


Looking for Love in Las Vegas

by red_river



Series: The Other Guardian [10]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Drunk Dean, Gen, Humor, M/M, One Night in Vegas, Pre-Slash, Romance, Team Bonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-24
Updated: 2013-11-24
Packaged: 2018-01-02 13:30:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 50,125
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1057329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/red_river/pseuds/red_river
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sam's not psyched for the Winchesters' annual pilgrimage to Vegas. Having an angel along doesn't change anything - or does it? Dean, Sam, and Castiel take Sin City, looking for liquor, loose women, and love or something like it. Sam and Cas centric; pre-slash. Lots of drunk Dean.  Part of the Other Guardian 'verse.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Afternoon

**Author's Note:**

> This was meant to be a light story that ended up with a fair amount of heart in it, too. A friend and I took a trip to Las Vegas, and afterward she commissioned this story: a saga in six parts, following the Winchesters and Castiel on one night’s trip through Las Vegas.
> 
> This story has recently been substantially edited so that it fits into the mild AU series I’ve been working on, the Other Guardian ’verse. In chronology it goes after One Step Closer and before Darkness Rising.
> 
> There is a more detailed note about the ‘verse in my profile, but in brief: after Dean is raised from Hell by Castiel, an entire year passes before the Lilith rises and the seals start to break. During that time, Castiel is assigned to watch over the Winchesters, and finds himself growing closer and closer to Sam
> 
> Cas and Sam centric, pre-slash, with plenty of Dean thrown in as well. Some swearing. Set during an alternate Season 4.

**Looking for Love in Las Vegas**

**Part I: Afternoon**

Las Vegas was one of those places that, having seen it once, Sam really felt no need to see again.

He always forgot to mention this before his and Dean's annual pilgrimage to Vegas.

Halfway between the Luxor and the Bellagio and flanked on both sides by palm trees bright with the afternoon sun, Dean revved the engine as the Impala idled at a stoplight, whipping off his sunglasses and sending Sam a grin that was all teeth.

"Final destination."

Sam did his best to smile back. Castiel leaned forward from the back seat with a slight frown on his face. "Our location has not changed," the angel informed their driver as he rested one hand against the back of Sam's seat. Sam glanced over his shoulder, and Castiel met his eyes grimly. "We are still in the car," he said.

Sam had decided, after a fair amount of time trapped in the Impala with the heavenly being, that this was Castiel's version of _Are we there yet?_ Cas had never really gotten used to the car.

From the driver's seat, Dean raised one hand in a gesture that Sam decided could be taken as _shut up_ , in its politest form. "You know what, Cas? Those who join road trips uninvited halfway there don't get to complain about spending time in the car. Longest six hours of my _life_ , listening to you two geeks gossip about who said what two thousand years ago. Like anyone cares."

"Sam cares," Castiel replied.

Sam just rolled his eyes and wished that Dean hadn't started this argument with the angel twice already. Soon, Sam promised himself, he would pull Cas aside and explain to him what being baited was, and why his brother was an expert at chumming the waters.

The light finally changed, and Dean gunned it through the intersection, switching lanes with a swerve as their hotel rose like an enormous golden tombstone on the left side of the road. "All right, kids—the second we hit the hotel lobby, shit's gonna get crazy, so let's just lay down the ground rules for the weekend right now." Sam raised an eyebrow and Castiel turned away to stare out his window as Dean lifted one finger into the air, performing for himself. "Rule number one: no one gets to tell me it's time to stop drinking. That time will never come." Sam shook his head half-heartedly. Dean raised another finger. "Rule number two: I get a bed to myself. I mean it, Sam—if Cas wants to party crash this vacation, he can share your bed."

"No one wants to share with you anyway," Sam found himself muttering, wondering whether it was cruising down the Vegas Strip or two days in a car with his older brother without a hunt to break up the monotony that made him revert to the maturity of an eight-year-old.

Dean scoffed and aimed a fake gun at Sam, like he was challenging him to a duel. "Hey—a hundred bucks says I get more people in my bed this weekend than you do, even counting Cas." Sam looked at him funny, and Dean screwed up his face, as if replaying the words in his head. "Okay. So admittedly that… came out kind of weird." Sam rolled his eyes; Dean was stupid and talking to him made Sam stupid, too. Dean jerked forward into the turn lane, and then settled back against his seat, waving the conversation away. "Whatever. What I'm trying to get to is rule number three—this is the big one. If you take a girl upstairs, _please_ , for the sake of all that's holy, put up the frickin' Do Not Disturb sign, all right? No one needs to see that. Hey—I'm talking to you, Cas."

Sam glanced at the angel in the rearview mirror. He didn't appear to be listening. Instead Castiel was staring out the window with rapt attention, studying the larger-than-life picture slapped across the side of the truck idling next to them.

"Cas?" Dean prompted.

"Hot babes direct to you," Castiel read aloud, his expression as blank as if he'd been perusing a McDonald's drive-thru menu. He turned back to face the brothers in the front seat, his eyes slightly narrowed in indulgent confusion. "What does that mean, Sam?"

Sam choked on his tongue, feeling his cheeks heat up all the way through his ears. "Um," he managed.

Dean laughed so hard the back of his head slapped against the crown of the bench seat. "You know what? You just might be lucky enough to find out, you awkward bastard," Dean told him.

"Dean," Sam admonished, feeling a prickle of equal parts frustration and irritation, and maybe the tiniest sliver of something like jealousy.

Dean just shrugged. "What? If there's one place anyone can find love, it's Vegas. Maybe even you'll finally get laid, Sam."

"Dean," Sam said again, a warning in his voice. Dean's leery look was the one he usually reserved for watching Girls Gone Wild and other bottom-of-the-beer-can hotel trash porn, but the image Sam's mind had flashed was less drunk blondes and more…flawless art of Rome. Sam's eyes started to drift to the backseat. Dean smacked his arm, giving him a look.

"Don't _Dean_ me. I know you prefer emotionally screwed-up monsters, but God knows you'd be easier to live with if you'd get some lovin' once in a while, Sammy."

"Don't call me that," Sam said as he pressed a hand to his forehead. Dean's continual laundry list of Sam's failures in love stung, probably more than his brother intended—or maybe it was just the reminder that a track record like that meant he had little to no shot of aiming higher. Especially not as high as his daydreams had been heading lately.

Castiel just blinked at the two of them. Then he glanced back at the truck outside—and if Sam didn't already know that Cas automatically remembered everything he read on sight, he'd have sworn the angel was memorizing that phone number.

Maybe this was a test, Sam thought as Dean drummed against the steering wheel, gearing up to belt out "Eye of the Tiger"—or on second thought, maybe some kind of punishment.

.x.

Dean led the way into the elevator down from the 33rd floor, jamming his thumb against the Close Door button as soon as Sam and Castiel had stepped inside. "All right—let's get this party started!" Dean declared, nodding as he pounded out a few beats on an air drum set Sam was beginning to worry would be with them for the entire weekend. The tall hunter couldn't help but roll his eyes at the ceiling.

"You did grab the room keys, right, Dean?" he asked, doing his best to keep his tone right around _can we focus please_ instead of slipping all the way into _you're a complete moron_ territory. Sam couldn't remember the exact age when Vegas had changed for him, but somewhere between being snuck into the back of bars and cooed over in the lobbies of hotels, and puking his guts out and dragging Dean off the streets when the cops came by, he had gone from reveler to designated drink-light-enough-to-be-the-babysitter.

"Oh, yeah." Dean dug one hand down into his coat pocket, producing two slim plastic keys. He slid one back into the depths of his green jacket and held the other one out to his brother, flicking it in front of Sam's face. "Here you go. Don't lose it, okay?"

Sam plucked the key from Dean's fingers and shoved it down into the front pocket of his jeans, giving his older brother a flat look. "Yeah. Because that was me that lost the room keys when he went skinny-dipping in the Bellagio fountain and some vagrants stole his pants."

Dean sniffed and glanced up at the descending numbers. "Eh. Details."

Castiel regarded Sam in passing with a deeply searching look, reminding Sam suddenly exactly how little their favorite angel still understood about sarcasm—but then Castiel's eyes shifted to Dean, and he held out one hand, staring at the older Winchester expectantly. "I didn't get one," Castiel said, his expression mild.

"You _don't_ get one," Dean told him, rocking back on the heels of his boots and leaning into the elevator wall. "Two per customer. So you and Sam are on the buddy system, all right? You stick together, stay within shouting distance… hold hands so you don't get lost," Dean finished, his trademark grin playing at the corners of his lips, and Sam thought about smacking his brother, he really did, but the idea of Cas's hand in his teased through his mind, and he licked his lips, watching the angel and waiting.

Castiel stared at Dean for a long moment without saying anything, his arm slowly falling back to his side. Then he glanced at Sam and held out one hand. Sam's heart jumped into his throat, but he swallowed it back down. He wasn't going to take advantage of the fact that his brother wasn't able to speak without jerking the angel around.

"Dean's just being a dick, Cas," Sam assured him quickly, stuffing his hands down into his pockets. Castiel's fingers retreated to his side once more.

The elevator slowed to a halt and dinged as the doors opened on the 30th floor. A woman with bouncing curls of red hair stepped into the elevator and smiled at them in passing, turning her back to them with polite disregard as she hit the button for the hotel's spa. Sam couldn't help noticing that she glanced at them over her shoulder a moment later, though, when Dean suddenly pushed himself up from the wall and straightened to his full height again, rummaging in his pockets.

"Oh, yeah—one more thing. Hold out your arm, Cas."

Castiel frowned a little at the command, but he reluctantly did as he was told, lifting his arm once more and holding his hand out flat in the space between Dean and himself. Dean's hand emerged from his pocket clutching a Sharpie, and almost before Sam processed what he intended to do with it Dean had yanked Castiel's sleeve back a few inches and was pressing the uncapped Sharpie to the angel's skin, writing five numbers in permanent black ink. Castiel watched him with a vaguely offended expression.

"There," Dean announced around the pen cap clenched in his teeth, releasing Castiel's arm after a long moment and returning the closed Sharpie to his pocket. He shook his head at Castiel, who was staring at the numbers on his arm as though they were written in a language he'd never seen before. "It's our room number," Dean explained. "First two numbers are the floor, then the room. In case you get separated or whatever—I don't want to have to come get you from the front desk because you couldn't find your way back upstairs."

"Dean, he's not five," Sam said, sending his older brother a pointed look. He was amazed sometimes at the liberties Dean took with the angel.

"I'll believe it when I see it," Dean muttered. Castiel just stared at his arm as though he was considering exorcising his new temporary tattoo from his skin.

Suddenly the redhead spoke up from the other side of the elevator, making Sam jump a little as she whipped around to face the three of them with an overly friendly smile bursting across her sunny features. "I did the same thing to my cousin," she proclaimed, directing the comment half to Dean and half to Castiel with a flirtatious little shrug that Sam was positive went right over the angel's head. Eight months after coming down for the first time, Cas still hadn't learned anything about human signals, or seemed to have any interest in learning, as far as Sam could tell—he wasn't even sure the angel was capable of understanding them. The girl had gone on without noticing: "In case she got too drunk and couldn't remember where we were staying. Except I wrote our room number on her ass, so that if she did forget, she'd have to get somebody to look at it for her. That'd be memorable, right?"

Dean sent Sam a shit-eating grin. "Welcome to Vegas," he said.

.x.

Castiel was the first to go missing.

Sam shouldered his way through the flashing lights and ringing bells that sounded across the casino floor, scanning the afternoon crowd for a familiar figure in an unmistakable tan trench coat. He and Dean had misplaced their tagalong angel somewhere between the elevators and the swimming pool, though Sam hadn't noticed until Dean did a cannonball into the deep end of the enormous kidney-shaped pool fully clothed (and slightly drunk) and Sam had turned to share a flat look with Castiel. Cas was nowhere in sight.

Dean's position, dripping wet as he leaned disinterested elbows on the edge of the pool, was that Cas was an adult and could handle himself—but Sam had a feeling only one of those things was true, and he knew Vegas could be a pretty confusing place even for people who'd had the benefit of growing up firmly on Planet Earth. So he'd set off to search for the missing angel, hoping on the one hand that Dean wouldn't drown before he got back and on the other that Castiel hadn't gotten himself into too much trouble walking around unsupervised.

Sam really didn't want to have to do a lost child announcement over the intercom, or fish Dean out of the drunk tank…or a first-aid station. Not on the first day.

He was doubling back through the endless rows of electronic slot machines near the martini bar when a hand seized his sleeve.

"Sam."

Sam whirled around, ripping his sleeve out of the unexpected hold before he realized the hand belonged to a surprised Castiel. But he couldn't be half as surprised as Sam was to find his errant angel seated in front of one of the slot machines, his trench coat spilling over the red vinyl stool, his other hand folded in his lap.

Sam let out a heavy sigh, equal parts relief and concern, and ran a hand through his hair. "Jeez, Cas—there you are. I was looking everywhere for you."

Castiel held his gaze with serious blue eyes, the usual mosaic of solemnity and cluelessness mastering his expression, and drawing the tall hunter imperceptibly closer. "Sam," the angel repeated in that hypnotic voice. "I need a dollar."

Sam blinked at Castiel, taking a step back. "What? Why?" Then his thoughts caught up with him, and he amended, "What happened to the twenty bucks Dean gave you before we left the hotel room?"

Castiel just looked up at Sam for a long moment. Then his eyes slid to the mismatched bars and sevens on the electronic reels in front of him.

Sam winced. He took a deep breath and tried to remind himself that although Dean had gotten hold of all their cash, even the emergency fund under the back seat of the Impala, Sam had all the credit cards, which at least meant that Dean, and apparently Cas, couldn't spend any more than every cent they had. Then he took hold of Castiel's shoulder and urged him up from the stool, leading his reluctant friend away from the blinking machine.

"Yeah. Hey, um—you know what, Cas? Let's, um—let's go find Dean. He's not totally sober right now and I think he might be filling up with water at the deep end of the pool."

Castiel's eyebrows drew together at this, and he let Sam lead him down one of the circuitous hallways, no longer dragging his feet. But all the same he couldn't help a backward glance over Sam's shoulder, his gaze settling after a moment on his companion's face.

"I could win, Sam."

Sam found a small smile tugging at the corner of his lips at the earnestness of the statement. The urge to take the angel's hand was there again, but Sam contented himself with just meeting expressive blue eyes. "You could, Cas. But somehow, I don't think you ever would."

.x.

Sam had never been a huge fan of walking the Strip before dark—or after, really. The lights were nice, once they came out, but they were a little less entrancing when you had to look at them through a constant crowd of belligerently drunk people, all of whom talked too loud and smelled like they'd dumped their drinks down their shirts. Somehow that didn't change the fact that walking the Strip when they came to Vegas had become Sam's _thing_ , in Dean's words—the thing they supposedly did for Sam's enjoyment in between all the things Dean would rather be doing, most of which involved beer or women without their clothes on.

Sam had never really found the words to explain to his brother that the reason he insisted on walking the Strip a couple times a night was because it was the only time he and Dean weren't in either a bar or a strip club, or some combination of the two, and because it was the only way he could get his own belligerent drunk, who talked too loud and smelled like his drink, to take a few minutes' break from knocking them back and put a little oxygen back in his bloodstream. So he just kept quiet and let Dean make his assertions about _the boring-ass things Sam liked to do in Vegas_ and followed his brother out of their hotel and onto the crowded sidewalk, resisting what had apparently become Sam's own new personal obsession: taking the angel's hand. But Dean's blatant mouthing off about the _Buddy System_ didn't make it seem like an especially good idea

Cas didn't always understand when he was being treated like a child, but when he did pick up on it, it tended to irritate him—sometimes enough so that the angel disappeared in the space between Dean's dick joke and his own dick laughter, which inevitably followed before Sam got a word in edgewise.

The sun was just beginning to set. Crisscrossed in the orange light and long shadows, Sam bobbed his head in perpetual apology as he fought his way through a crosswalk, pedestrians streaming in both directions and swimming against each other like antagonistic salmon. He was trying to keep one eye on Dean, ranging ahead of him through the crowd, and the other on Castiel, who insisted on walking on the right side of the chaotic traffic flow and kept getting left behind—so he was startled when he finally hit the curb and a man stepped out in front of him, blocking Sam's path and slapping his hands together.

"Hey," the man said, trying to shove a small paper card into Sam's hand. Sam glanced down long enough to verify that it was what he thought it was and then pulled his hands up, palms out, so that he couldn't grab anything on accident.

"No thanks," Sam told him. He stepped to the side and glanced into the crowd again, seeking the back of Dean's carelessly disappearing head—but he didn't look back in time to stop Castiel from reaching automatically for the card he was being offered, his unsuspecting hand open in front of him.

"Here," the man on the corner grunted, crushing the paper into the angel's palm. Castiel stared down at it with a blank expression.

Sam pushed back to his side through the sea of people and clapped a hand onto the angel's shoulder, fighting down that same heat that tried to creep up his neck. "Whoa, Cas. Let's just… put that back," he tried, removing the graphic advertisement for a stripper named Candi from Castiel's hand and holding it out to the man once more. The man just stared at him with less than friendly eyes, so after a moment Sam had no choice but to drop the card and let it flutter to the pavement, which was practically carpeted with the things. Then he gave Castiel a gentle push and propelled him into the crowd, bending toward the angel's ear as they walked so that he could be heard over the blare of car horns and cranked stereos. "We don't want those, Cas," he explained, letting his hand linger on the shoulder of the angel's trench coat. Questions flitted through his mind about Castiel, and if the angel felt anything human at all behind those sharp, observing eyes. In the end, Sam just squeezed the other man's shoulder before letting go. "If anybody tries to hand you stuff like that, just… don't take it, okay?"

Castiel looked up at him, his expression somewhere between normal confusion and a considering frown. "Aren't you looking for love, Sam?" he asked, sounding genuinely concerned.

Sam tripped over his own feet and kicked a scatter of stripper ads into the road. For one moment he thought maybe he had been found out, that after successfully pining for the angel in secret for so long he had somehow given himself away—but Cas's blue eyes were fixed on the cheap cards at their feet.

Dean was a whole street ahead of them now, but he had finally noticed they weren't keeping up—he stood on the opposite street corner and stared at Sam with his hands up in a _what the fuck?_ sort of gesture as the cars roared between them. Sam shrugged in return. Then he looked back to find that Castiel had lifted his gaze to Sam, apparently waiting for an answer. He took a deep breath, trying to trap all the scattered thoughts that had briefly escaped.

"Well, um… look, Cas," Sam started, shoving his hands deep into the pockets of his jeans. There was the truth, and then there was _the truth_. Sam licked his lips and turned away. "That's not love, okay? Not really. That's… honestly, probably as far from love as you can get."

Castiel tipped his head to one side. "That isn't what Dean said."

Sam closed his eyes for a moment, fighting the urge to strangle his stupid brother. Maybe because he seemed to make everything harder whether he was there or not, or maybe just because he had somehow had this conversation with Cas. "Yeah, I know. And it can be—complicated. But just take my word for it… anything they're handing out flyers for on a street corner in Las Vegas, that's not love. All right?"

Cas studied him for a long moment without speaking, leaving Sam with the impression that the angel could probably see right through him to the feelings Sam had been so desperately trying to keep to himself. A moment later, though, the angel was leaning to the side, staring around Sam toward the other side of the street.

"Dean is killing himself," Castiel announced.

Sam turned back to see that the walk signal had come up and his ever-impatient brother was motioning them across with one annoyed hand, the other held up to his temple like a fake pistol. Sam rolled his eyes. He was slightly annoyed at the interruption, but mostly glad, because he had a feeling he wasn't ready to know the answers to all his questions about the angel, at least not just yet. A genuine smile slipped onto Sam's face as he brushed his fingers against the sleeve of Cas's coat

"Come on—let's catch up before he throws a fit."

Sam was never sure how much Castiel listened to him in the first place. It was hard to tell when the angel was taking in someone's words and when he had tuned them out, shutting off his ears as effectively as if he'd zapped himself somewhere else entirely. Maybe it was different for Dean, but Sam was really only positive he had the angel's undivided attention about forty percent of the time. Still, despite all his awkward fumbling toward the end of his explanation, he was gratified to see Castiel turn away from the man on the next street corner, shunning the explicit advertisement. Sam shook his head. Some days maybe the best he could hope for was to counter just the outer edges of Dean's influence on their resident angel…

"Dude, look!" Dean declared when they reached him, waving a fan of six stripper cards in their faces and sporting a demonic grin. "It's like baseball cards."

Sam seriously considered beating his head against the wall of Caesar's Palace.

.x.

Sam was tall for a human. This wasn't something of which Castiel was always aware—most of the time he felt infinitely larger than the Winchesters even in his vessel, so he was only really conscious of Sam's unusual height when he observed him in the company of other humans, when he towered over the majority of them even though he tended to stand with his shoulders slumped. It was only in the company of other people that Castiel understood that Dean wasn't short after all—he was just shorter than Sam.

Castiel didn't know whether Sam enjoyed being tall or not; it had never occurred to him to ask. It seemed like an advantageous attribute sometimes, when the younger Winchester needed to pull himself into high windows or retrieve something from a very high shelf. It seemed disadvantageous when he had to squeeze himself into the Impala—a distinctly small car, Castiel had decided, even for someone of a more usual height. But whatever Sam's general opinion of being so tall, Castiel had a feeling he was not pleased to be standing out above the crowd tonight.

With an impact that made his beer splash in its glass, Dean dropped onto the seat of their rounded booth and leaned conspiratorially over the table toward his brother, a morbidly wide grin on his face. "Good news, Sammy. That brunette at the bar? She's totally interested in you."

The Winchesters and Castiel had been at this particular establishment for almost an hour, seated at a circular booth surrounded by a bench seat in one corner of the bar. Castiel was seated between the brothers, unable at most moments to slide out from behind the table if he desired to; he wasn't certain whether that was coincidence or whether he had been sequestered. Sam, sitting to his right, had been half-slumped over the table, guarding his three-quarters-full bottle of beer with one arm in case Dean tried to replace it with a full one and keeping his eyes fixed either on Castiel or the small bowl of unshelled peanuts resting on the waxed tabletop. Now, though, he rolled his eyes and cast his gaze out across the room—trying to identify which brunette at the bar Dean was talking about, Castiel supposed. The angel wasn't sure whether Sam bothered to find her before he turned back to his brother and shook his head.

"Dean—just lay off, all right? I'm not gonna do this."

Dean's level of drunkenness was escalating. Castiel knew this in part because he could sense the increasing damage to the older hunter's liver with every subsequent drink; more simply, though, he had learned that the more impaired Dean got, the more determined he became to arrange Sam's evening with a woman chosen at random, until he eventually careened over the precipice of limited awareness and could only be concerned with finding a date for himself. Dean hadn't reached that point yet. Castiel assumed this was why he got a sharply stubborn look on his face at Sam's brush-off and leaned farther over the table, planting his elbows on the polished wood.

"What is wrong with you, man? She's all the way across the room and she's practically throwing herself at you already." Castiel followed Dean's pointing finger toward the bar, but couldn't pick out one woman more than the others who seemed likely to fling herself at their table. Human expressions like desire were difficult for him to identify sometimes. Dean took a swig of his beer and dropped his voice as if to whisper—but Dean had been talking abnormally loudly all afternoon, so the words were about average in decibel. "Look, I know you're a little out of practice, Sammy, but trust me—this is a walk in the park. She made it _very_ clear to me that she's a sucker for really tall guys." Dean sat back and slapped the tabletop as if he'd made some kind of a joke. "Her words, not mine."

Sam shook his head a few times, the way Castiel had seen him do when Dean said something particularly mindless, as if the younger Winchester wanted to get the echoes out of his ears as quickly as possible. Then he squinted across the table at his brother, a few wrinkles settling over his forehead. "Tall?" he repeated, his chin dipping with the inquiry.

Dean raised his eyebrows, the corners of his lips turning down to try and contain his smile. "Yeah, you know—tall. As in _big_. You reading me here?"

Sam stared at his older brother for a long moment before he shook his head again, tipping his head to one side in a way that asked a question without Sam having to voice anything. Dean shrugged and lifted his eyebrows twice in quick succession. There was a lot of this manner of communication between the Winchesters, and Castiel didn't understand most of it—the small gestures honed to particular expression, he imagined, through years of nonverbal interaction. Usually Castiel didn't care to know what they were talking about, choosing to believe that their silent conversations were either none of his business or not of any interest in the first place. But tonight, he found he was slightly annoyed at not being able to follow along. Perhaps it was simply because he was quickly tiring of being trapped between them, irked by the pounding atmosphere and the dim lighting as the red sky outside began to dull. Or perhaps it was the edge of strain showing on Sam's face, just the shadow of some emotion Castiel couldn't read brushing his features as the younger Winchester glanced at him and then back at his brother, slumping forward and propping his chin up on one fatigued hand.

"What do you care, Dean? I'm fine—I swear. Just focus on your own entertainment, all right?"

Dean frowned and banged his beer glass down onto the table. "I care because I just spent ten minutes doing the wingman thing and setting you up for a perfect bases-loaded home run—"

"Telling her I was _tall_ ," Sam confirmed, his eyes narrowed in exasperation.

"No one can deny that you're tall, Sam," Dean shot back, his voice rising to a borderline shout once more.

At last Castiel felt there was an opening in their conversation, though not a particularly meaningful one. He pulled the dish of peanuts toward himself and snapped one open. "It's true, Sam," the angel interrupted them, shifting slightly in his seat so that he faced Sam more completely. "You are very tall. It would be impossible to deny that."

Both brothers turned to look at him, silent for a moment as his words hung between the pulsing music and the stamp of graceless feet. Dean's frown said there was a good possibility he'd forgotten Castiel was even present, which wasn't particularly surprising—Dean often forgot where Castiel was if he hadn't called the angel for something he needed specifically. Sam just looked sympathetic and a little drawn, like there was so much he'd have liked to explain to Castiel if time were not a factor. Castiel felt Sam looked at him that way an inordinate amount of the time.

At last Sam sighed under his breath and let his eyes slide back to Dean, pursing his lips into a vague frown. "Look, Dean, I'm just not interested, okay? And I'm not going to just take off right now to sleep with someone I don't know."

"Why not?" Dean demanded.

Sam glanced surreptitiously to his left, his gaze catching Castiel's for the briefest of moments before descending into his beer. Castiel frowned, his suspicion that he was somehow implicitly a part of this conversation deepening as Dean glanced at him too and then returned to his brother, shrugging dismissive shoulders.

"So? He's a big boy, Sam. He can watch himself for—what's it going to take you, eight minutes?"

Sam rolled back in his seat and pushed his beer into the middle of the table. "I am not having this conversation with you."

"Don't have it with me. Have it with her!" Dean growled.

Castiel frowned at the older hunter, his hand stilling over his small pile of peanut shells. Dean and Sam knew each other well enough that there was a great deal they left out when they talked, especially when they fought, and Castiel most often found himself hopelessly lost trying to follow their disagreements. But Sam was starting to get upset now, and Dean could be a sharp-tongued drunk, Castiel knew from experience. The angel braced his hands on the tabletop and leaned forward until he was partially between them. Castiel let out a short, irritated breath. "Dean—"

"Um, excuse me?"

The voice was unfamiliar to all three of them; Castiel looked up to see a short caramel-skinned woman in a black leather outfit that did not actually conceal much of her standing beside their table and twining a strand of deep black hair around her finger. She was at least partially intoxicated, Castiel could tell from her anxious giggles, and she was staring at Sam with a smile that was some combination of self-conscious and hysterical. A few tables farther into the room, a group of women of similar ages and manner of dress were watching her from behind their cocktails, most of them doing their best not to laugh.

Castiel turned to fix Dean with a puzzled look. "You said she was brunette."

Dean sent him an equally puzzled look back. "What?"

"I'm sorry," the woman broke in, tugging on one of the fishnet gloves that wrapped through her fidgeting fingers. "I'm not trying to bother you, and I know this is a really weird question, but…" Her eyes returned to Sam's face, nervous but excited as she shifted her feet. "My friends and I just saw a Chippendales show like, an hour ago, and… I was just wondering, were you the really tall fireman?"

Castiel didn't know what Chippendales was. Which was to say, he'd noted a video screen advertising that establishment during their earlier city walk, which seemed to depict a number of men standing on a stage and not overly clothed, but he didn't truly understand it as an abstract concept. The fact that Dean had choked on his mouthful of beer and Sam had gone pale confirmed his assumption that it wasn't a positive thing.

"Um…" Sam stumbled over his words, blinking a little too fast as he stared up at the strange woman and worked his tongue against the backs of his teeth. "No. Definitely not. I don't work there." He seemed to wince on the last word, that small expression conveying to Castiel that Sam would never have worked there, and was either bemused or a little offended to be asked. But the woman did not retreat.

"Oh, no, I'm sorry—I'm not trying to embarrass you or anything," she said, holding up both hands as if to pacify him. "It's just it was a really good show, and… you were really good." She sighed as she said the last, shifting half a step closer to Sam's side of the booth. There was something about the increased proximity that Castiel did not entirely like, but he was not sure why.

Sam smiled a little, his disbelieving smile, and leaned back into the black vinyl cushions. "I'm sorry, but you _really_ have me confused with someone else. I'm not—"

"No, it was totally you!" the woman interrupted, nodding so fast that her round earrings swung like pendulums past her chin. "I know it was. And I just wanted to say, it was… really hot when you tore your shirt off. You looked so passionate. I mean—wow." The woman broke off and pushed one hand up into her hair, holding the curling strands back from her face. "I just wanted you to know that you were the best fireman up there. Not that all of you performers weren't hot—just—you were the best. You really lit my fire, if you know what I mean."

Dean was sniggering into his beer, his shoulders shaking so hard Castiel wondered for a moment if he was aspirating. Sam blinked up at the disruptive woman as his cheeks slowly turned red—embarrassed, Castiel theorized, as much for the woman as for himself. The angel had begun to notice Sam's face flushing sometimes, and he had decided that there was something pleasant about that expression, when it was accompanied with a smile. But the expression on Sam's face now was very different somehow; it reminded him more of the way Sam looked when he was about to be violently ill.

"Um… look…" Sam tried again, wetting his lips with his uncertain tongue. "I'm really—"

"I was just wondering if I could get a picture with you!" the woman blurted out breathlessly, holding up a camera that was bound to her wrist and crowding forward until she was right up against the table. "It'll just take a sec. Please?"

Sam turned to stare at his companions, his wide eyes begging for some kind of assistance. Dean was far too busy choking on the condensation in his drink, but Castiel straightened in his seat, his eyes slightly narrowed.

"Sam does not tear off his shirt in public," he announced conclusively, looking up from the desecrated bowl of peanuts to pin the woman's dark gaze with his own piercing blue. "He is a highly decent person and would not engage in behaviors such as this for money. He is also…" The angel paused, recalling Sam's words carefully. "…not going to just take off to sleep with someone he doesn't know."

Sam was staring at Castiel with his mouth partway open—the angel wasn't certain whether to categorize his expression as surprised or horrified. Dean was pounding on his own chest and coughing into the edge of the table like he needed lifesaving procedures. The woman stared at him in silence for a long moment without moving, apparently shocked; Castiel returned her stare, idly inspecting her frail human features. Her nose had been broken once, he could tell, though it had healed well and only a small bump remained at the bridge to evoke the image of a childhood accident, a passing spatter of blood. Then the woman took a step back, and Castiel's impressions of her faded, her essence blurring into the vague backdrop of all the human souls to which he paid no particular attention.

"Oh my God, I'm… I'm so sorry," she stammered, mortification and alcohol climbing into a flush on her cheeks. The woman lifted her hands but let them drop before the gesture could take on any meaning. "I was just so sure… you probably get that all the time," she finished, addressing the last to Sam.

Sam gave her what Castiel could only call a pained smile. "No. First time," he said.

"Oh," the woman replied, looking, if possible, even more embarrassed. "Okay. Well, I'm gonna… sorry…" With this last stumbled apology, she turned and fled into the center of the bar, reappearing a moment later at the women's table across the room slapping the shoulders of a laughing blonde.

At their own table, everything was quiet for a minute as Sam turned to look at Castiel with an expression the angel couldn't begin to decipher and Dean gradually choked his way back to breathing, hacking a few drops of amber beer out onto the tabletop. When he was finally able to inhale and exhale normally once more, Dean looked up at his companions and wiped the back of his hand against the corners of his eyes, which were wet, Castiel noticed.

"Dude, Sammy, that was…" Dean broke off and grinned at his brother, shaking his head emphatically. "You know what? I can't even make fun of you properly until I have a full beer to enjoy it with. Hold that thought." With a laugh that bordered on a cackle, Dean stood up from the booth and made his way across the bar at a casual strut, winking as he passed the women's table. The caramel-skinned woman hid behind her Moscato.

Sam and Castiel were left alone at the table, and the silence stayed with them, only deepening as Sam locked his fingers together and dropped his head down to rest against his hands. Castiel was concerned for a moment that he had upset him—it was hard to know, always, with Sam, what would help him and what would make him miserable. His was a complex mind. But at last the angel noticed a smile lifting the corners of his lips, and Sam turned his head far enough to catch Castiel's gaze, his hazel eyes bemused in the dim light of the lamps.

"Cas, you are…" Sam laughed, straightening in his seat and then dropping back against the cushioned wall of the booth. "Something else," he concluded, his expression relaxing into a soft smile. "I mean, it'd be nice if the earth would rise up and swallow me before Dean gets back to the table, but…"

Castiel watched him with perceptive eyes. "This is not where you would have wanted to spend the evening," he decided.

Sam sunk back into the vinyl. "Not really," he replied, his lips quirked ruefully upward.

Castiel nodded. "I feel that way as well," he agreed. Then he paused, holding the words in his mind for a moment before enunciating them carefully. "Maybe this just isn't our kind of thing," Castiel said, meeting Sam's eyes with his sincere gaze.

The words earned him a genuine smile, just a hint of Sam's dimples showing through as the young man shook his head. "You know what, Cas?" he said, reaching for a peanut. "You're totally right."


	2. Evening

**Looking for Love in Las Vegas**

**Part II: Evening**

The woman behind the hotel's customer service desk looked pissed. She glared at Sam over the rims of her leopard-patterned frames with piercing intensity, one hand resting on her keyboard and the other tapping relentlessly against the countertop between them, her long fingernails clicking on the fake marble. Her scowl reminded Sam of a particular librarian in Cleveland who had scared the crap out of his eight-year-old self when John Winchester yanked them out of school without warning and he couldn't return the book he'd borrowed until they swung through Ohio again nine months later. Sam had a rule about taking library books home after that.

He did his best to look genial as he slid both room keys across the counter.

"Are you sure they're not working, sir?" the woman asked, scorn and disbelief dripping from her tone. Sam carefully swallowed his sigh.

"No. Like I said, we tried them both… multiple times." Almost as many times as he'd related this, he guessed. Dean, who was standing at Sam's side impatient to change out of the shirt that two maybe-legal co-eds had drenched in a couple of badly handled appletinis, elbowed his brother in the back. Sam gave the woman a forced smile. "It would be really, really nice if we could get into the hotel room."

The woman picked up the cards and flipped them over in her hand, as though she were checking for vandalism. "You didn't do anything to them?" she asked, her green eyes pinning Sam with unfaltering skepticism.

Sam blinked back at her. "Do anything?" he repeated.

The woman rolled her eyes behind her glasses. "You didn't try to swipe them through a credit card reader, or put them into the slot machines… run them under a magnet…"

Sam's eyebrows drew together. "Why would I do that?" he asked.

For the first time, a flicker of humanity crossed the woman's face, making her expression almost sympathetic for a moment as she shook her head. "You wouldn't believe the things people do." Then the hostility was back, the hardened interrogator tapping both room keys against her palm like key pieces of evidence that might trigger his confession. "Were you carrying them in the same pocket as your cell phone?" she wanted to know.

"Can we speed this up a little bit?" Dean growled in his ear, his still-damp shirt brushing unpleasantly against Sam's arm. "These apple fumes are making me sick. And I smell like a frickin' metrosexual."

"It takes as long as it takes, Dean," Sam muttered back, carefully putting a patient smile on his face before returning to the customer service agent. "No. Neither of them were near our cell phones. They're just… not working."

The woman fixed Sam with a stern look, holding his gaze for an interminable moment like she was conducting some kind of customer service polygraph based entirely on eye contact. Finally she sighed and slapped the room cards down next to her computer, her long French tips pecking away at the keyboard so viciously it almost hurt to watch. "Let me see what I can do," she told him through another sigh, her lips thinning with undisguised aggravation.

Sam fought down a wince. "Thanks. I'm sorry about all of this," he said, wondering why he felt like he had to apologize for making this woman do her job.

The woman's head snapped up from its death glare at the computer screen, a perfectly lipsticked smile suddenly the centerpiece of her expression. "It's no trouble at all, sir. We're here to make your stay as comfortable and relaxing as possible in any way that we can. We value your business."

"Right," Sam replied. "Thanks. I guess."

The woman's attention whipped back to her computer, and Sam found himself patting the countertop with an awkward hand, until her beady eyes fixed on his fidgeting fingers and froze them to the fake marble. Sam wondered if his expression was as pained as he felt.

"This is just going to take a minute, Dean," he said after the quiet had stretched out too long, deciding that even one of his brother's snarky comebacks would be better than standing there at the counter with only the sharp click of irritated fingernails to break the silence. When he didn't get a riposte, Sam turned his head to see Dean staring off across the hotel lobby, his eyes fixed on something near the revolving doors that led out onto the early evening streets. Sam quirked an eyebrow. "Dean, what are you looking at?"

Dean leaned back on his heels, crossing his arms over his chest. "Eh, not much, Sammy. Just some girl's perfect bare ass."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Dean, don't be a jack—" Then he turned far enough to realize that the girl in question was standing in the midst of the crowded lobby wearing a tank top and a bright blue thong, with nothing covering her lower half but a flimsy wrap of transparent gauze wound around her waist. Sam couldn't help shaking his head. "Wow," he amended. "My bad. At that point, I guess she's asking people to stare."

"Happy to oblige," Dean told him, giving his brother a grin that showed far too many teeth.

Dean could always get at least an incredulous smile out of him, even if it was only because the cartoonish, slack-jawed expression was more reminiscent of the wolf that drooled over Jessica Rabbit than a bona fide Casanova.

"Whatever, man," Sam said, glancing back at the woman behind the customer service desk, who was still typing away furiously. It seemed like she should have written a novel by now, and he wondered for a second if she was updating her Facebook page or something instead of resetting the room keys—then Sam recognized a silence that he should have noticed a long time ago, and he pivoted on one foot, searching the lobby with suddenly wary eyes. "Dude, where's Cas?" he asked, nudging Dean with one elbow.

Dean glanced at Sam and then out over the sea of heads, shrugging when he also failed to detect a conspicuous tan trench coat in the sea of t-shirts and sundresses. "I don't know. You were supposed to be watching him."

"I was—" Sam threw his hand toward the customer service counter at his back, then stopped, casting his eyes up to the ceiling for a second before he let his arm drop back to his side. "Whatever. Will you please just go find him? He's not exactly in his element here."

Dean shook his head once. "No can do, Sammy. I'm busy."

"Busy doing what?" Sam demanded. "You're just standing there…" Then he realized exactly where his brother's gaze had tracked back to, and he rolled his eyes, his hands settling on his hips. "Oh, for God's sake, Dean."

"What?" Dean said. "You said it yourself, Sammy—she put it out there. I'm just enjoying the view."

Sam rubbed the bridge of his nose. "You can be such a lech, you know that?"

Dean shrugged. "Eh. Like I said—busy. You go find Cas. I'll wait for the new keys."

Sam glanced over his shoulder at the customer service woman, wondering how much attention she'd been paying to his brother and whether she'd be willing to give up the room keys to someone who honestly reeked of oversweet apples—but the woman was still just typing away, no closer to solving their problem, as far as he could tell, than when he'd first walked up to the desk fifteen minutes ago, and an extremely awkward angel on the loose in a place that advertised strippers and criminal lawyers one after another on the highway billboards was potentially much more serious than having to argue with the customer service agent again. With a sigh of general misgiving, Sam stepped away from the position at the head of the customer service line he'd been guarding for a quarter of an hour, slapping Dean's shoulder in passing.

"Okay, I'll find him. But just… stay here until we get back, okay? Don't disappear somewhere while I'm gone."

"No worries," Dean called after him as Sam navigated the cross traffic of the busy lobby. "Right now, I wouldn't be anywhere else."

Sam shook his head once more, sparing a moment to hope that the short-tempered woman behind the counter didn't catch his brother openly staring at another guest's rear and have him hauled off by hotel security. That was also on the first-day _don'ts_ list. But looking for Castiel soon put Dean out of his mind. The hotel's first-floor casino was busier now than when they'd wandered down to the pool after checking in; the roulette tables were in action, and knots of people had gathered around them, gamblers and spectators alike crowded toward the soft green foam and the clack of the spinning ball. Sam felt a sudden lurch of familiarity in his gut as he noticed one figure standing on the outside edge of one of the tables, his eyes riveted to the motion of the white ball over red and black slots.

At least he knew the angel was already out of money.

Sam pushed through the spectators and grabbed Castiel's shoulder. "Cas," he said, drawing that eternally sharp gaze to his face in a second. Sam jerked his head back toward the lobby, forking his fingers through the long strands of his hair, an unexpected feeling of anxiety bubbling up in his stomach. "What are you doing over here? Come on—we've almost got the keys fixed. Don't wander off, okay?"

It was one of Sam's great worries—that his brother would somehow manage to corrupt the angel that deigned to spend so much time with the Winchesters. Cas had seemed mostly immune Dean, but now that his brother had all of Sin City to work with, that worried feeling had slipped into overdrive. Not to mention that Dean had spent half the car ride making up bad information and statistics about the Vegas tables, which Castiel had clearly put too much stock in.

Castiel studied him for a second, his eyes slightly narrowed as if he were considering not only Sam's current request but everything he had been told since arriving in Vegas. Then he glanced back at the roulette dealer with the same critical stare, his expression solemn but sincere when he turned to Sam once more. "This table has the best odds in Las Vegas," Castiel told him seriously, looking up at the young man with an expression that was somehow thousands of years old and completely gullible at the exact same time. "We could win this one, Sam."

Sam wasn't sure whether he wanted to smile or grimace, so in the end he just swallowed, brushing an errant piece of hair behind his ear. The angel's gaze followed the movement.

"It seems like it should work that way, doesn't it, Cas?" Sam said, dredging up half a smile. Then he led the angel away from the temptation of gambling for the second time in one day and placed a light hand against his back—because if Dean could put bad thoughts into the angel's head, certainly Sam must have an equal and opposite power. Or something like that.

"Come on," Sam said, letting his hand slide down slowly. "It's time to eat anyway. We just have to run up to the room first so Dean doesn't smell like a walking minibar—" Then he was struck by a realization that stopped him dead in the midst of the clanging slot machines, and he turned around to face Castiel fully, his disbelieving hand falling all the way back to his side. "Wait a minute. You could have zapped us into the hotel room as soon as we couldn't get the door open."

Castiel's expression was blank. "Yes."

Sam's shoulders slumped, disbelief overtaking his face as he lifted two inquiring hands into the space between them. "Why didn't you say anything?" he asked, shaking his head and squeezing his eyes shut for a moment as he relived his encounter with the slowest customer service agent in the state of Nevada. "I mean…it's just…Cas, we could have gotten into the room an hour ago."

Castiel's eyes narrowed in confusion. "Dean didn't say he wanted to get into the room. He said he wanted the key to work. I could not fix that, Sam."

And it was all just ridiculous enough that Sam found all he could do was laugh a little, leaning into Cas's warm shoulder—because really, angels could be far too literal sometimes.

.x.

Sam had only turned his back on them for a minute and a half.

About ten minutes after arriving in Vegas and definitely about thirty seconds after losing Castiel on the way to the swimming pool, Sam had come to the decision that leaving his brother or his angelic guardian alone, together or separately, was going to be a serious recipe for trouble. So far, he wasn't having a ton of success dogging their heels. This time, though, he'd taken off of his own volition. After the buffet, which had been sixty long minutes of Dean cramming ribs down his gullet in spite of Sam's warnings that five pounds of barbequed pork was not the smartest thing to throw into a stomach already churning with alcohol, and Castiel proving that he could probably have put down the entire buffet without even feeling it, Sam had left them at the cashier and ducked into the lobby store next door to the restaurant for some badly needed antacids. Sam didn't need them, because he'd eaten like a normal person instead of going back for third helpings of everything like his brother insisted, but he was pretty sure Dean would before too long, whatever his idiotic older brother was currently claiming about his iron stomach.

The antacids were right at eye level behind the sales counter, and there was no line, so a minute and a half was all it took Sam to make his purchase and step out onto the boardwalk in front of Treasure Island, where Dean and Castiel were waiting for him next to the ivory pirate ship. Somehow, in that time, a stick of cotton candy had appeared in Castiel's hand.

He and Dean seemed to be fighting about it.

"It's just cotton candy," Dean was insisting as Sam approached—not for the first time, he guessed, if his older brother's aggravated tone was anything to go by. Dean threw one hand toward the swirled pink confection that Castiel was holding out stiffly a full foot in front of him, the paper cone clenched in his fingers. "It's not a nuclear bomb, all right?"

Castiel tracked Sam's arrival with his eyes, but turned back to Dean as soon as the younger man drew up beside him, a few wrinkles that Sam recognized as annoyance that he was being misunderstood creasing the angel's forehead. "I wanted to know what it was," Castiel said gravely, pushing the cotton candy toward Dean again. "I did not say I wanted it."

Dean scoffed. "Well, don't bitch at me. The guy behind the dessert counter gave it to you. You think I wanted to pay for that on top of the buffet? No. But instead of just beaming yourself out here like any normal angel, you walk up behind me while I'm paying, and _I_ get crapped on by the cashier for trying to steal hokey carnival food from an all-you-can-eat buffet. You shouldn't even be able to steal from buffets," he finished, casting his brother a sour look. Sam just shrugged. He had a feeling people like Dean were the reason you had to pay to carry food out of buffets.

Castiel looked even more irritated than before, if that were possible, so Dean changed tacks, slapping one hand onto the angel's rigid shoulder.

"Look, just try it. You'll probably like it—you and that killer sweet tooth." Sam quirked his lips together to hold back his smile at the memory of the three bowls of ice cream Castiel had devoured before they left the buffet, just one more precious sliver of information about the angel that he was filing away for later. Castiel didn't move, though, and Dean rolled his eyes. "It's good, Cas. People like cotton candy."

"You don't want it," Castiel pointed out.

"That's because one wafer-thin mint would pop me all over the sidewalk right now," Dean practically growled. Sam lifted the packet of Tums he'd just purchased, but his brother held up a warning finger, refusing the offer before Sam could say anything. "No. I told you, I'm fine. And you…" Dean turned back to Castiel, his finger shifting target with him. "Deal with the cotton candy. You asked about it, you can eat it."

Castiel studied the older Winchester for a minute more, his eyes eventually drifting down to the paper cone in his hand and the sugar threads of the cotton candy sparkling in the boardwalk lights. After a long moment of contemplation, he lifted his gaze to Sam, holding out the pink swirl to his younger companion instead.

"This is not food, Sam," Castiel said, his voice flat, but with an edge of uncertainty. Sam wasn't trying to laugh at the angel, but he couldn't stop the corners of his lips from quirking up into a smile, because even though it was a little silly—a full-grown man trying to escape from a cone of cotton candy—after months of waging perpetual war against all the bad information Dean insisted on putting into Castiel's head, he would take any victory if it meant Cas was turning to him for answers instead of his idiotic older brother.

"It's candy, Cas," he said gently. "It's fine—you'll probably like it. Just try a bite, okay?"

Castiel's eyes still radiated skepticism, but he dropped his gaze to the cotton candy once more, considering it with his mouth set in a reluctant line. Sam was about one second from suggesting they just find a trash can and put the whole thing behind them when the angel's shoulders relaxed, something like resignation settling into his expression. "How does one eat this?" Castiel asked, searching Sam's face with serious eyes.

Sam racked his brain for the best words. "You just sort of—here." Sam was pretty sure he'd seen this maneuver depicted in a bad '50s date movie, but he tried not to think about that as he tucked his hair back behind his ears and then took hold of Castiel's hand, tipping the paper cone forward until he could get a mouthful of cotton candy. The angel's fingers were warm and inviting under his, but his nerves were too fried to hold on for long—Sam let go after just a moment and leaned back on his heels, licking the threads of sugar from the corners of his mouth. "See? Like that."

As he pulled away, Sam noticed Dean slowly shaking his head, regarding his brother with an expression of deep betrayal. "Sammy—come on, man," Dean said, sending him a look that was becoming all too familiar after a whole summer of Dean calling Cas out on his behavior: no staring, no showing up nude, no touching below the waist—scratch that, no touching at all—no sharing drinks, and on and on, always followed by the inevitable moment when Sam himself broke these rules with barely a roll of his eyes. Dean made a disgusted sound in the back of his throat.

"You do not share cotton candy with dudes, Sam. I taught you better than that."

Castiel stared at the place Sam had taken a bite, looking slightly disconcerted. "This portion is disintegrating," he objected.

Sam managed not to sigh. "That's just the sugar crystalizing," he promised. "It won't change the taste, Cas."

At last Castiel did. He didn't say anything about it, but Sam decided the fact that the angel took a second bite a few moments later and didn't toss the contentious sugar swirl into any of the trash cans they passed as they made their way down the Strip, heading to the next bar on Dean's list, meant that it had passed muster. There was only one incident that had to be diffused, and Sam did that as quickly as possible, leading Castiel away from the little girl and her scandalized mother at a near run—because while there was something about an angel in a long trench coat walking down the Vegas Strip at twilight with a stick of cotton candy that Sam found absolutely wonderful, he didn't think it was a good idea to hand that cotton candy out to strangers' children, no matter how good his intentions.

.x.

Dean was not drunk.

Dean knew a lot about being drunk. He'd spent a lot of really good times in that frame of mind. And some not as good times, naturally. But he wasn't focusing on those tonight. Actually all Dean was focusing on right at that moment was how awesome he was, because even buzzed so hard that he could actually feel his skull vibrating—which was still buzzed, whatever Sam said—he had managed to lead his lame-ass brother and their divine tagalong to a club where the barstools were real saddles and a ridiculously stacked chick in a black leather bikini and tasseled chaps was perched on one of them maybe four feet from him, her feet knocked into gloriously high stirrups. Actually, Dean wasn't focused on that either. He was just focused on her rocking belly button, which looked trippy with the killer way the club lights were bobbing over his head.

Yeah. So Dean wasn't drunk. Or maybe it would have been fairer to say that he wasn't drunk yet. Whatever. Point was, Sam had been way ahead of the curve telling Dean _maybe he wanted to slow down_ when he ordered another margarita however long ago—it was the one that was empty in front of him, anyway. But Sam was always like that when they came to Vegas—always wanted to stop Dean short of having _too good a time_. Like there was any such thing.

Thinking about Sam made Dean realize he hadn't heard his little brother's nagging voice in a while, and he dragged his eyes away from the gyrating Gilley girl, turning around in his chair to survey the rest of the table they'd staked out right by the bar. Sam was gone, his hulking form nowhere in sight, but Cas was still in his chair, stiff and unfriendly as usual and looking like he had a 300-foot pole shoved up his ass—which was maybe about right, considering how big the angel liked to brag his true form was. But Dean was just buzzed enough that he couldn't really bring himself to care where Sam had slunk off to. Sam was a buzzkill anyway until he got at least half as drunk as Dean liked to be most of the time, and his baby brother was being stingy as hell with his own liquor tonight. That was Cas's fault, too. Or, just that. Dean couldn't remember where his train of thought had started. It didn't seem important.

"Hey, Cas!" he shouted over the music—some country mess that he was only putting up with because he had a feeling it was connected somehow to the hot girls in chaps. Sam had said something about a "strip club roadhouse," which sounded like the best thing ever to Dean right now. Especially if they served steak, too. That thought made him grin—and yeah, he was looking over at Cas, but it wasn't like he was really grinning _at_ Cas, so the angel had no right to look all wary and offended and lean back a couple inches in his chair. But Cas could do whatever he wanted, because he looked like a total douchebag sitting there in his beat-up trench coat in the middle of a cowgirl bar. If Dean thought he could do it without losing a couple fingers, he would've ripped that coat off.

"Why are you staring at me?" Castiel demanded all of a sudden, looking all pissy again, like Dean had seriously ruffled his feathers. Dean felt his lips stretching back in a wide grin. He was the funniest man in the room every day of his life, but he was on _fire_ when he was drunk.

Buzzed.

"Havin' fun yet, Cas?" Dean hollered over the pounding guitar riffs. Castiel winced like he was talking too loud—but whatever, maybe angels had delicate ears. Dean wasn't one of those dicks who yelled all the time when they were drunk.

"This is a place of overwhelming sin," Castiel told him, leaning forward in his seat and casting a wary glance over Dean's shoulder—at the smoking hot waitress, probably.

Dean shrugged and took a drink of his beer—he was doing the tequila, beer, tequila thing. "Why do you think we're here, man? We came for the sin." Cas looked mildly affronted at that, but Dean shook it off—the angel was a tool, and Dean didn't like hanging out with him at bars anyway. If Sam was a buzzkill, Cas was a frickin' heart attack. Suddenly Dean was wondering about his teetotaler brother again, and he slumped forward to brace one elbow on the table, squinting at Castiel through the whirling lights. "Hey. Where's our resident Chippendale stripper, anyway?" he asked, sporting an unstoppable grin—but really, who could keep a straight face with that sweet little blackmail moment in mind?

Castiel looked even more offended, if that were even possible, and at first it seemed like he was going to keep his lips zipped—but after a silence so long Dean thought he might have died in the middle and just not noticed, the angel's eyes finally cut across to the door leading onto the open-air patio, his expression grave. "Sam needed to get air," he said, mangling the phrase as usual. Dean wondered if Cas even knew what that meant.

Then he realized how weird that was, Sam getting air, because Sam never left him on his own in bars—not in Vegas. Maybe he thought Cas was babysitting. Dean scrunched up his face. He didn't want Cas for a babysitter, or for whatever you called the friend assigned to sit on you while you got shitfaced in a bar. Maybe that just fell into the category of a wingman. Dean wanted Cas for a wingman even less. Cas was an even worse wingman than Sam, judging by the way he'd shut down Dean's baby brother's chances with the half-drunk Chippendale girl earlier that night. But that was funny, because…

Dean lurched forward in his seat and swung an arm out to punch Castiel in the shoulder. The angel's piercing blue eyes stared at the point of contact like Dean had put a hole in it instead of just giving him a friendly bump.

"You are a shit wingman, you know that?" Dean told him, pointing one only barely shaking finger at Castiel. "I'm a hundred times the wingman you are, and that's just wrong, man. 'Cause you're supposed to be an angel." Castiel's clueless eyes lifted to meet Dean's; the hunter downed the last of his beer and hoisted the bottle in one fist, gesturing sort of in the direction of Cas's back. "Wingman? Angel? How are you not getting this?"

Castiel just narrowed his eyes, which Dean had decided was the angel's version of Sam's bitchface—like he needed to deal with two of those. Sam used to be less bitchy after he'd slept with a demon or a vampire or whatever, though, and that reminded Dean of a bone he wanted to pick with Castiel, because it was one thing for the angel to be all up in his brother's space like they were each half of a pair of handcuffs when he dropped in on them in Nowheresville, Nowhere, but this was Vegas. With another heave, Dean rocked forward and punched the angel's shoulder again, a little harder this time. Not that Cas probably even felt it, being a bastard of the heavenly variety.

"Why'd you chase off that girl before?" Dean demanded. Castiel glanced around him in both directions, and the hunter blew a frustrated breath out through his teeth. "Not here. At the first bar. The Chippendale girl. Sammy could have had that in the bag and you screwed it up."

Castiel tipped his head slightly in confusion. "Sam did not have a bag."

"Ugh…" Dean gave a low groan and dragged a hand down his face, pointing the business end of his beer bottle at the brainless wonder across the table. "Talking to you is impossible, you know that, Cas? Trying to have a conversation with you is like trying to have a conversation with the freak lovechild of a Vulcan and Cousin It." Dean was buzzed enough at the moment to think that kind of sounded like an awesome TV show.

Cas was getting annoyed with him, too, Dean could tell—the angel's eyebrows had drawn together, pinching his face like he was sucking on the lime from the rim of Dean's empty margarita. "I don't understand that reference," Castiel told him flatly—like he couldn't tell that from the look on his face.

Dean slammed his beer bottle down onto the corner of the table. "You know what? Fuck you. We're not talking about you. We're talking about Sam." It took Dean's brain a minute to track back to what he'd wanted to say, but then he remembered, and he braced both hands against the tabletop to keep it from bucking long enough to make his point. "You don't seem to care whether you ever get laid, and that's not my problem—but Sam is, and if he's all set up to get some love from a chick who's drunk enough to think he's a male stripper, I don't want Wingman 2.0 blowing that out of the water. All right?" Dean leaned back in his chair and brought the empty margarita glass to his lips again, wishing the crushed ice tasted more like tequila. "Sam's not smooth enough to score all the time without you slamming the door in their faces, too. So no more of that. You got me?"

Dean couldn't entirely remember all of the words he'd just said, which made it harder to guess how many were phrases Castiel wouldn't have understood—but the angel seemed to have figured out what he was pissed about, anyway, because he shifted in his chair and fixed Dean with a skeptical look, shaking his head once. "Sam said that is not love," Castiel told him, his serious tone making the hunter roll his eyes.

"That's because Sam got all his dumb ideas about love from some chick flick he watched in college," Dean countered. "He's like… Julia Roberts in _Pretty Woman_. He's delusional," he added after a moment when Castiel's expression stayed blank. Then he arched back in his chair and allowed his eyes to roll over the gorgeous lower half of the waitress delivering mojitos to the next table, glancing back at Cas with his ladykiller grin firmly in place. "Take my word for it, Cas—everything you need to know about love, you can learn right here in Las Vegas. Right here in this bar," he amended, reaching over and slipping a five-dollar bill into the belt of the cowgirl's chaps. The flirty little shake of her ass he got in return was definitely worth the money. Dean turned back to the angel and raised his eyebrows suggestively. Then he reached over and slapped a single into Castiel's palm, jerking his head toward the waitress. "C'mon. You try it."

Castiel stared at the bill in his hand like it was laced with something. "I will not—"

"Hey, guys."

Dean looked up into the hazy atmosphere of the lights to find that his soberer-than-thou little brother had appeared at Castiel's shoulder, smiling down at them as he brushed his hair back behind his ears—which was a girly gesture Dean didn't know when he'd picked up, and was maybe going to have to beat out of him. That was his prerogative, being the awesome older brother he was. Sam looked between the two of them with curious eyes like he could feel the pseudo-tension of their not-argument still hovering over the table.

"Sorry—got a call from Bobby while I was outside. He just wanted to know how everything was going. What were you guys talking about?" Sam asked after a beat, slipping back into the seat next to Castiel and tucking himself into the table. Then he noticed the dollar in the angel's hand, and he snatched it away in an instant, sending Dean that trademark bitchy look as he buried the single in his jacket pocket. "Dean, for crying out loud," Sam griped, folding his arms across his chest.

Dean decided Cas wasn't the only crap wingman at the table.

.x.

Hands shoved deep in his pockets, Sam wandered down the sidewalk behind his brother and Castiel, taking in the lights of the Mirage and their reflection in the man-made lake that bordered the Strip. Dean had reached that stage of drunk where he got restless and insisted on wandering from bar to bar, which meant they were seeing the Strip about sixty feet at a time—sometimes around in circles when Dean decided after ten minutes of walking that where he really wanted to be was the bar across the street from where they'd started. In the meantime, Dean was keeping himself entertained with one of his favorite pastimes: telling embarrassing one-time-when-Sam-got-wasted-in-Vegas stories.

Sam wondered if public humiliation was a universal thing for older siblings or if that was just one more way that he'd gotten lucky.

Usually Dean had to tell these stories to himself, to a really chagrined Sam, and to whoever was unlucky enough to be in shouting distance, since Dean's volume was usually a little amped by the time he got in the storytelling mood. But for the first time tonight, Sam felt like he could understand how those people felt in B comedies when their mother-in-law or some other horrible relative was telling their date all the awful secrets they'd rather have taken to the grave. Except Sam didn't even have a date—if anything he was the third wheel, and Dean was outdoing himself, jawing to his guardian angel like he was commissioning a new verse of the Bible.

"So there we are—hottest new club in Vegas. Paint practically still wet on the walls," Dean was saying. He had grabbed the lapel of Castiel's trench coat about the time he stumbled over his own feet and nearly broke his toe on the rim of the Neptune Fountain, and was now sort of half-leading, half-leaning on the angel as they walked, yanking his companion forward with every step. Cas looked a little annoyed, but Sam couldn't help that familiar jealousy at how simple it always seemed to be for Dean to reach out to his angel.

Dean paused his story to take a long swig from the two-foot-long plastic souvenir glass that housed his enormous margarita—probably the reason why walking around didn't seem to be sobering him up at all. He turned back and tossed Sam a grin, then threw his arm over Castiel's shoulders, earning a wary look from the angel at his side.

"Picture this, Cas: ugliest girl you can possibly imagine—played by Sam." Sam was a little embarrassed when Castiel's eyes strayed back to him. "Worst song ever recorded: Don't you wish your girlfriend was a freak like me. Now imagine this: _Dya na na na—_ "

Dean threw his hand up over his head in what was maybe a really drunk rendition of the disco swim and rocked his body in circles to his tuneless singsong, splashing margarita carelessly from the lip of his cup. Castiel's face was suddenly alarmed and he pulled himself well out of Dean's reach, giving the older Winchester a look somewhere between irritation and physical distress.

"This was…required for a hunt?" Castiel hazarded, and his eyes flickered back to Sam, an uncertain expression on his face. Sam fought down a blush at being given the benefit of the doubt. He jogged a step forward until he was right behind Dean, raising his voice over the cacophony of Katy Perry blaring from the nearby casino's speakers.

"Not exactly. Well, actually it wasn't a hunt. But I was only doing it because I—"

"Because he's a freak, Cas—it's all there in the song," Dean cut him off. He sent Sam an _I'm so damn precious_ look that his brother wasn't buying right now, and swayed his hips from side to side, holding his margarita in front of him like a stripper pole. "Come on, Sammy—do the dance for us," he goaded, grinning through his teeth. "I can't remember—did you striptease your jacket off before or after that girl shoved a twenty down your shorts?"

Dean had told these stories to a lot of waitresses and bartenders and drunk keno players over the years. Sam had learned early that Dean liked his own version of the story and it wasn't worth getting into a debate over what did or didn't happen, especially because arguing with Dean when he was drunk was like trying to argue with a religious extremist. By now Sam was pretty used to just taking his licks lying down. But something about the troubled look Castiel was shooting him—given the context, Sam thought it probably translated to _Don't you wish your friend wasn't a freak like me_ —made Sam want to set the record straight for once. Or maybe it was just knowing that if he let it go right now, Castiel would remember it Dean's way forever.

Sam shook his head and lengthened his stride until he was walking abreast of Dean and Castiel, and sent his asshole brother a flat look. "Dude, that's not the whole story and you know it."

Dean threw his head back in a cackle. "Please, Sammy," he invited, sweeping his margarita over the sidewalk before them in a grand gesture. "Enlighten us. I would _love_ to hear what was going on in your head as you shook it on the bar. You made one guy puke, you know."

"He puked because he'd just downed twenty-one shots of tequila," Sam protested.

Dean shrugged. "I think you helped him along."

"How do you even remember this?" Sam asked incredulously, shaking his head. "You were literally passed out over the table, drooling on some girl's purse."

"Some things I would never miss, Sammy," Dean promised him, lifting his eyebrows devilishly.

Sometimes Sam wondered why the things Dean remembered were never the things he wished his brother was paying attention to. Castiel sort of frowned at Dean for a moment before his gaze crept over to Sam, and he seemed to be waiting for the promised explanation, though his lips were pressed into an uncertain line that made Sam wonder if the heavenly jury was still out, or whether this was one more thing Dean had managed to change from fiction into fact just by shouting loudly enough. Sam took a deep breath and stuck a passing elbow in his older brother's ribs, and then turned his attention to the angel on his right, pushing his hair back from his face.

"Okay, um…so first of all, I was _really_ smashed. I was seeing stars. I mean, I think I was trying to count how many stairs I had to climb to get to the bar, and it was a flat floor." Castiel looked, if possible, even more concerned at this, and Sam found himself stumbling forward with his explanation, trying to find the words to make the angel understand. "And we'd been at this club for hours, so we had this huge tab. So then I go up to the bar to pay it off, and my credit card won't go through—none of them. Dean's, either."

Castiel's eyes narrowed slightly. "Is this something that happens often?" he asked, glancing at the bulge in Sam's jacket where he was currently harboring both his and Dean's wallets for safekeeping. To Sam he looked a little nervous.

Sam gave him a smile. "Not that much anymore. Back then we weren't as good at…" He trailed off when he remembered suddenly that he hadn't really explained to Castiel yet that the Winchesters' main source of money was credit card fraud. It was less like a secret and more like a subject he just hadn't felt like broaching with an Angel of the Lord—but Sam sidestepped it either way, coughing once to change the topic. "You don't have to worry about that, Cas. We carry plenty of cash now. But we didn't have any that day. Mostly because Dean had already gone through three strip clubs and cleaned us out," he added, reaching out to slap his idiot brother's shoulder and shooting him a look. Dean was busy performing a very mocking stumble-jive and missed it entirely. Sam rolled his eyes and turned back to his sober companion. "I think he gave the strippers forty bucks each in singles."

"Dean spends a great deal of money that way," Castiel told him, a sympathetic look crossing his face. Sam was impressed that the angel had figured that out after only four hours in Vegas—but then again, Dean had been hitting it pretty hard tonight. But more importantly, when Sam snuck a glance over at the angel, Castiel was looking at him with understanding, not like a piece of mystery meat that had come to life and crawled out of the refrigerator, which was how the waitresses and keno players usually reacted to this anecdote. Sam hurried on with his side of the story, even as Dean crowed "Worth every penny" and took a huge swig of his margarita.

"So the cards are busted. We owe like eighty bucks in gin and whiskey. Bartender's pissed. Dean's down for the count. And I was drunk and we needed money and…" Sam found that he was almost smiling himself, staring up at the only two stars that made it through the Vegas smog and shaking his head ruefully. "I don't know. I just thought, you know, if girls could make money that way…"

Dean was laughing at him again, his teeth bared like a jackal. "My baby brother, stripping and dancing for money. Maybe that Chippendale girl wasn't so far off, huh, Cas?"

Castiel sent Sam a look he couldn't read.

"It wasn't like that," Sam tried, his gaze moving back and forth between the angel on his right and the cackling maniac on his left. "And I couldn't get away with that anymore anyway. I was way younger when that happened."

"How young?" Castiel asked, a note of concern in his gravel voice.

Sam looked up at the distant shape of the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel and shook his head, realizing that for the first time ever when sharing these stories he was fighting down a smile. "I don't know, like, seventeen. I was underage," he admitted, wondering as an afterthought if Castiel even knew what that meant. The angel's expression said he was either completely confused or utterly disapproving—maybe both.

"Wait, you were seventeen?" Dean demanded, whirling to face Sam so quickly that he lost his balance and almost toppled over, another splash of his margarita hitting the concrete. He grabbed the shoulder of Sam's jacket to keep himself upright. "You weren't even legal? I totally shoulda clocked that Harley biker in the leather pants who slapped your ass on his way out the door."

Now Castiel definitely looked horrified. Sam felt a flicker against the back of his coat, as if the angel's hand had come up to brush against his shoulder, but Sam would never know for sure because he was too busy digging the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, trying to fight back the Dean headache beating on the inside of his skull. His brother always had to bring up that one extra thing he was trying so hard to erase from his memory. "Dude… if you were conscious, why did you ever let that happen?"

"I was only half conscious, but…" Dean pulled the straw out of his margarita with his teeth and slurped the air through it, holding it out in front of him and waving it like some demented elephant. "I figured you got where you were going on that one. I mean, come on. _Dya na na na—_ "

Sam was distracted from the very disturbing image of his brother shaking his ass in the middle of the crowded Strip by a light tap on his shoulder.

"Excuse me. Will you take our picture?"

"What?" Sam turned to find a tourist couple looking up at him, their Nikon in hand. It took him a moment to process their question, and then he wondered not for the first time if he had one of those overly friendly faces, because it felt like he couldn't take two steps in this town without getting a camera shoved at him. He also wondered who in their right mind would talk to him right now, walking down the street with his obnoxious, gyrating older brother and, well, Cas. He dredged up a genial expression anyway. "Oh. Sure. Smile, I guess."

It seemed like Sam should be able to do a simple favor for another human being without exciting his brother the hyena, but by the time he'd finished snapping the shot and turned back to his companions, something had set Dean off again, and he was snorting into his two-foot margarita, the straw tucked safely inside once more. Castiel was looking at the older hunter through narrowed eyes, like he was evaluating the odds that whatever Dean had was contagious. Sam crossed his arms.

"What?" he asked.

Dean waved him off. "Ah, nothing. Just remembering Bridge Troll."

Sam felt the confusion contorting his face. "Bridge Troll? Dean, what the hell?"

"You don't remember Bridge Troll?" Dean practically howled.

Sam raised his eyebrows. "I… guess not."

Castiel's gaze bounced between them, something between confusion and caution clouding his face. "I am not familiar with this creature. What is a bridge troll?"

Sam fought the urge to laugh, deciding not for the first time that he was going to have to sit Castiel down with Grimm's Fairytales at some point, just to fill the angel in on a few of the most universal references. He racked his brains for a short explanation. "It's not a real creature, Cas. There's this fairytale about three goats—"

"Forget the fairytale, princess," Dean cut him off. The older hunter launched himself with surprising dexterity into the space between Sam and Castiel and threw an arm over each of their shoulders, pulling them forward to continue their walk down the Strip. "I'll tell you a better story, Cas," he said, his margarita tube swinging obnoxiously under Sam's nose. "This story is called Sammy the Camera Thief and the Big Bad Handbag."

Sam couldn't help rolling his eyes. "If you're trying to riff off Little Red Riding Hood, there wasn't even a troll in that fairytale."

"Shut up. It's not your turn to talk."

Dean slapped his shoulder with the mostly empty margarita, splashing a few drops onto Sam's shirt. Castiel glanced between the two of them, frowning slightly—Sam wanted to believe it was because the angel had been happier walking next to him, but a more likely explanation was just that Dean was a really obnoxious drunk. Sam shoved the margarita tube out of his face as Dean went on.

"This was a while back—Sam still had his boy band haircut, instead of this girly mess…" Dean lifted one hand and mussed it through Sam's hair; Sam jerked his head back. "Anyway, I took him to this bar with these Smirnov Jell-o shooters, and he got…" Dean broke off to laugh so hard Sam thought he might have collapsed, if he hadn't been leaning on them already. "Totally bombed. And then we went up on this walkway by the Bellagio. Remember?" Dean asked, smacking Sam in the chest. "Because you wanted to see the candy-ass fountain show?"

"I remember you upchucking down the side of the escalator," Sam replied, wrinkling his nose. Dean ignored him like a pro.

"So we're up there, and all these people keep asking Sam to take their pictures. Like you were sober enough to aim a camera," he added, tightening his arm around his brother's neck—harder than Sam thought he probably meant to, unless Dean was trying to spice up their evening by separating his vertebrae. "Anyway—Sam gets all into it. And he starts, like, chasing people around the bridge, trying to take their pictures—I mean like ripping cameras out of people's hands. Scared the shit out of that punk kid with the skateboard. I think he thought you were going to chuck him off the bridge."

Sam shook his head, wishing that he remembered his own version of a few more of these incidents, instead of just the version he'd heard from Dean year after year. For better or worse, he never recalled much from the times he'd been well and truly smashed. "It's not like I was terrorizing him on purpose," he hazarded all the same. He could feel the flames of embarrassment searing his cheeks, and he couldn't even bring himself to look over and see how Castiel was taking this story.

"Dude, have you seen yourself?" Dean demanded, flipping up his right hand in a gesture of disbelief and accidentally slapping the side of Castiel's head in the process. The angel jerked as far away from Dean as the older hunter's elbow allowed. "All six feet four inches of you, running around with your arms out, that sloppy stupid grin on your face like the whole world is your Happy Meal—you were fuckin' monstrous, man. Anyone woulda run. He probably thought you were on PCP." Then Dean laughed again, stumbling over a careless soda can and gripping Sam's shoulder to stay upright. "I was afraid somebody was gonna call the cops and have your ass hauled off, Sammy. Good thing that old lady stepped in and beat you down with her purse." Dean released them both so that he could throw his arms up over his head, cowering behind the clear plastic of his souvenir glass. "And you're all like, 'I'm sorry! I'm sorry!' Man, she gave you a frickin' black eye. If I hadn't been laughing so hard I couldn't stand up I'd have kicked your ass for getting K.O.'d by an octogenarian."

"She was probably just in her sixties," Sam muttered under his breath. He knew his face was beefsteak-tomato red by now, and he wasn't sure if it was because Castiel had stopped looking at Dean and was now staring fixedly at him, or if it was because Dean's volume was starting to draw looks from the crowd, a huddle of college girls pointing at them and giggling behind their manicures. Sam ducked his head, trying to avoid their eyes and convey some sort of apology at the same time.

He was surprised but definitely pleased when Castiel's voice broke through Dean's guffaws a moment later.

"What about Dean?"

Both Sam and Dean turned to look at the angel, who had been largely silent to that point; Castiel's head was tipped slightly to one side, his eyes thoughtful as he regarded both Winchesters. Dean sent him a drunk, slightly misdirected scowl, frowning at a patch of air a few inches over Castiel's shoulder.

"'What about Dean?'" Dean repeated, his voice purposefully gruff. "What's that mean? Who's that question even meant for? I swear, Cas—every time I think we've got you socialized…"

The way Castiel narrowed his eyes told Sam he knew he was being mocked—but the angel refused to be put off. He turned far enough to face Dean squarely. "You drink more than Sam," he stated frankly. "I have never seen him more intoxicated than you are at the time. Have you never… frightened children or been attacked by the elderly?" His eyes flickered to Sam as he spoke, a thread of confusion bothering his forehead like he couldn't decide how serious the crime really was; Sam sent him a little smile for the vote of confidence. But Dean just scoffed, tossing his head at the thought.

"Me? No way. Because unlike _Sammy_ here, I can hold my liquor."

"Yeah, right up until you _can't_ ," Sam broke in, giving his brother a flat look.

Dean's head jerked around so that he could stare at Sam. "What's that supposed to mean?"

Sam gave a laugh that was really more like a sigh, sending his brother a disbelieving smile. "It means that you can drink more than anyone else I know, but once you hit that wall, you become a menace to society. You don't get funny when you're drunk, Dean—you just get stupid."

"When have I ever done anything stupid?" Dean wanted to know.

His brother was obviously way too plastered to realize that you never gave somebody an opening like that. Sam took it all the same.

"How about that time you came out of a strip club without your pants on?" Sam volunteered. Castiel's curious gaze whipped over to him, and Sam felt a laugh bubbling up in his chest, breaking as he raised an eyebrow at his unsteady brother. "What did you tell me? You wouldn't give her your wallet so she asked you to take your pants off, and you were dumb enough to do it—then she stole them while you were zonked out in the booth. And then I had to walk all ten blocks back to the hotel with you in nothing but pirate boxers."

Sam was more than a little gratified to see that Dean was getting the chastising look from Castiel now, though there was something about the angel's expression that seemed amused to Sam in a way it hadn't before. Dean did his best to shrug the story off, taking another slurp of his melted margarita.

"Hey—pirates never go out of style. Plus, I almost scored in those."

"Would that be when you propositioned that woman in the lobby in your bad Irish pirate accent and she told you she was fifty bucks an hour, and no kissing?" Sam pressed, a little surprised how good it felt to get his licks in every once in a while. Castiel's gaze was on his face and Sam shook his head for the angel's benefit, a lighter feeling rising in his chest. "I only got her to leave once I told her you'd already been rolled."

Dean was frowning now, lengthening his stride—as if he had any prayer of getting away from them with as drunk as he was. "I don't really remember that," he said.

"Oh, you don't remember?" Sam echoed. "Okay. How about the time you put some guy in the hospital because you were throwing bar darts totally sloshed and you stuck one in his neck?" Sam shot Castiel another smile over his brother's head. "Or when you got us kicked out of the bar at our hotel because you tried to pay some other hotel guest twenty bucks to sit in your lap? And then we had to slink back in at three in the morning to get to our rooms—I thought that bouncer at the door was going to give you the chair."

"What chair?" Castiel asked.

"That wasn't even the worst part," Sam told him in a lower voice, leaning around Dean to speak to the angel directly. "When we finally got into the elevator…"

Dean was damn good at dishing it out, but Sam's brother had never been all that great at taking it. So Sam wasn't particularly shocked when Dean broke step and whirled around to face both of them, throwing his arms out to the side in a human roadblock.

"You know what? We're done. No one wants to hear the end of that story. Not to mention we should be getting drunk off our asses right now. Where's that bar with the Roman dude?"

Sam came to a reluctant stop, staring at his brother in exasperation. "You mean the very first bar we came to after we left Gilley's?"

Dean shrugged. "Sure. I guess. Come on—we've been walking too much anyway." He lurched between the two of them and started back the way he'd come, in a remarkably straight line considering he probably had more alcohol than blood in his veins right now. Then he turned back and sent Sam a look, raising one finger in warning. "And no more Dean stories, Sammy. You got me?" Sam just rolled his eyes.

Castiel seemed slightly annoyed by the constant change of direction; Sam bumped the angel's elbow with his own, trying to give Cas a sympathetic _me too_ with his eyes as he led the way after Dean's retreating back, both of them silent for once as the sounds of the Strip at dusk swept over them from all sides. The angel seemed occupied with his own thoughts, and Sam didn't want to intrude on that—but as they squeezed between oncoming pedestrians in a busy crosswalk, their shoulders bumping, Castiel suddenly leaned up and spoke into Sam's ear, his breath tingling on the too-warm skin.

"I would like to hear the end of that story, Sam."

Sam ducked his head, a real smile crossed his face—because even though he sometimes felt he had to fight to get anyone's ear, more and more Castiel was becoming the exception. He shifted until he was walking one step behind the angel and then leaned down in return, keeping his voice low enough that only Cas could hear him. "So when we got into the elevator…"

"Hey!" Dean called back, turning around at the opposite street corner and fixing them both with suspicious if watery eyes. "What are you telling him?"

"Nothing," Sam promised, blinking back at his brother like he was an angel, too.

Nothing Dean's liquor-logged ears would pick up from eight feet ahead, anyway.


	3. Twilight

**Looking for Love in Las Vegas**

**Part III: Twilight**

Sam was more familiar than anybody probably needed to be with the bars in Las Vegas. But he could deal with that. He just wished he weren't equally familiar with all of the associated bathrooms.

With a long sigh, Sam leaned back against the closed door of the handicapped stall and rapped his hand against the white metal, staring up at the ceiling. "Hey, Dean—you still alive?" he asked, carefully keeping his tone away from the _I wish we didn't have to do this at least once every year_ inflection. No one answered from inside, though, and Sam rolled his eyes at the silence, tapping one foot against the ground. "Man, you have to at least groan at me or something. If you don't I'm coming in there."

There was a decisive groan from inside. Judging by the echoes, it sounded like his brother was still huddled over the toilet, his elbows propped up on the seat. Sam wrinkled his nose and tried not to think about it.

"Okay," he said, trying for reassuring. "Good. Just checking. I sent Cas to get some stronger medicine, so just hang in there, all right?"

Another groan. Somehow this one sounded to Sam like _Leave me the hell alone_. He wondered if that was just what he usually heard in Dean's nonverbal communication or if he'd really spent so much time standing outside of bathroom stalls watching over his sick brother that they were actually developing a language. It was a sad thought.

Sam hadn't been super excited to go into another bar, but it turned out the alternative was worse. They had taken about four steps into the bar by Caesar's Palace before Dean buckled and folded forward like he was about to do a somersault, clutching his mouth in a pose Sam recognized all too well. The nearby patrons seemed to recognize it, too. They'd made too much of a scene to get away with taking the Angel Express, so Sam had hustled Dean to the bathroom on foot, pleading with Cas over his shoulder to go buy some anti-nausea medication and a bottle of water at the hotel's gift shop—something stronger than the Tums he'd picked up after the buffet, but preferably still an anti-diarrheal. He was more than a little mortified to have had to ask that of the angel, and part of him was always worried about sending Castiel shopping alone, but from what Sam remembered, the gift shop had a pretty good selection of antiemetics. It was probably one of their best sellers.

The silence had stretched on too long. Sam knocked on the door again.

"Dean, you okay?"

"Stop asking that," his brother's very rough voice demanded from within the stall, accompanied by a banging that Sam thought might be Dean smacking his forehead against the seat. "If I was okay I would come out of… ugh." His voice trailed off into a groan, followed by a sound that Sam really didn't want to think about. The younger hunter winced.

"Look, I'm not trying to harp on you, man," he said through the door, turning to rest his temple against the cold metal. "But if I don't hear from you every thirty seconds or so I wonder if you're aspirating in there. So just make some noise, okay?"

"Screw you," Dean told him, demonstrating his understanding masterfully.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Yeah, like that." He swallowed another sigh and settled his shoulders back against the door. There was no telling how long these things would take. At least there was a really nice fresco on the ceiling. He studied the thick swirls of Roman gods and goddesses overhead and compared them absently to the tile mosaic in another Vegas bathroom, and wished he hadn't spent so long staring at them both that he could actually critique the artwork.

After a short silence, Sam heard the toilet flush in the stall behind him—there was no other hint of movement, though. Then Dean's voice reached him over the swirling of the water, sounding sort of hoarse and exhausted. "Hey, Sammy?"

"Yeah?" Sam answered, tilting his head back against the door.

"You gotta promise me something, okay?" Dean said, shuffling a little as if he were getting up on his knees. Sam shook his head even though Dean couldn't see him.

"It won't work," he told his brother, shifting his feet into a new position. A man in a bright blue sweatshirt stepped into the bathroom, and Sam did his best to give him a polite smile, pretending for a minute that he'd met eyes with a stranger he was passing on the street and that he wasn't leaning against a stall door listening to Dean lose everything he'd put in his stomach all night. In the end, the man hesitated for a moment and then walked out without so much as washing his hands. Sam decided he couldn't really blame him.

"The next time I try to do something like this…" Dean was saying, undaunted by Sam's skepticism and the retreating footsteps of their short-lived company.

Sam rolled his eyes. "Man, I told you you'd regret downing like twenty ribs and two slices of Bundt cake after drinking that much."

He heard Dean cough and then spit into the toilet. "Fuck, don't tell me anything. Just kick my ass. I give you full permission," Dean rasped, shuffling behind the door with some movement Sam couldn't identify. Then his brother must have been thinking about something, because there was a pause before he added, "Besides, I wouldn't have had to eat that much cake if you didn't take the last piece of pecan pie."

Sam slumped back against the stall door, directing his aggravation at Neptune and the hordes of mermaids on the ceiling. "I told you, Dean—half of the pie was left when I took that piece. If you hadn't eaten so many ribs you might have gotten over there before it was gone."

"You know what—excuses aside, you got pie and I didn't," Dean griped. "So I think I deserve a little sympathy."

Sam squeezed his eyes shut briefly and shook his head. "What do you think I'm doing here, Dean?"

"Mostly bitching at me so far."

Sam took a deep breath and reminded himself that Dean was bent over a toilet with the aftertaste of badly digested barbeque and tequila in his mouth, and that on that basis alone he should cut his older brother some slack. Fortunately he was saved from any more of that cheery exchange by the familiar rustle of wings at his back, and was glad not for the first time that all the other stalls were empty. He turned around to find Castiel holding out a plastic bag.

"Sam. I found what you asked for," the angel said in his usual deadpan, his eyes flitting with passing curiosity over the features of the bathroom. Sam gave him a drained smile.

"Thanks, Cas." He rummaged through the plastic bag and then rolled the bottle of water under the stall door, listening for the clink as it hit the base of the toilet. "Dean—drink this, okay? It'll help. When you come out, I've got… I think it's basically the Hulk version of Pepto Bismol." Dean grunted at him with his usual overwhelming gratitude. Sam winced and turned back to Castiel. "He'll be fine. Sorry for making you run the errands."

"They were not difficult," Castiel assured him. Sam decided that was essentially equivalent to _You're welcome_. An apology was on the tip of his tongue, for subjecting Castiel to the horrors of casino gift shops or Dean's gastrointestinal cycle or maybe just Vegas in general—but before any of it could burst from his lips he noticed that Cas had one hand open at his waist, and that something colorful was resting in the flat of his palm, the bright orange sphere looking very out of place next to his navy tie and trench coat. Sam blinked.

"Cas, what is that?" he asked, gesturing to his companion's hand. Castiel extended his arm and Sam bent toward it to get a better look. Then his eyebrows drew together. "Is that a gumball?" he asked when the recognition finally snapped in his brain, straightening to his full height and staring at Castiel well and truly baffled. Castiel regarded him dispassionately.

"There was another machine, Sam," the angel told him simply. Sam lifted his hands in an unspoken question. Castiel's eyes narrowed just a little, as though he were searching his vocabulary for the right words. "Like the ones in the lobby of our hotel."

"A slot machine?" Sam clarified, though everything inside of him protested that they'd had a miscommunication somewhere.

"It was very similar," Castiel decided. The hand that had previously been holding the plastic bag slipped into one of the pockets of his trench coat, and emerged clutching a scatter of coins, which Sam assumed to be his change. Castiel lifted a quarter between his fingers and held it up for Sam's scrutiny. "When I completed your purchase, the store attendant gave me several of these. I told her that I only wanted the medicine, so she suggested that I insert two of them into a small machine on the counter. I won this."

He held out the candy again. Suddenly Sam understood exactly what kind of a machine Castiel had found, and even though he was standing outside the handicapped stall in the bathroom at Caesar's Palace waiting for his brother to get his insides back under control, he found that he was unexpectedly grateful for all the very human things that Castiel didn't understand, because he thought an angel of the Lord offering him a gumball was probably the best thing that had ever happened to him in a Las Vegas bathroom.

"This machine seemed much easier to operate than the previous one," Castiel said, with his usual seriousness.

Sam offered him a smile, tucking a loose strand of hair back behind one ear. "No kidding."

The angel cocked his head to one side, as though he were trying to decode the amusement he must have seen in Sam's face. After a moment he seemed to give up, and merely extended his hand again, a little wrinkle creasing his forehead. "Do you want it?" Castiel asked, peering up into Sam's eyes.

Sam did his best never to refuse any gesture Cas made, but the persistent smell of antiseptic soap and a little too much bleach sort of had his gag reflex on a hair trigger, and he couldn't bring himself to throw some artificial orange flavor into the mix. "Wow, Cas, um… you know what, I…" Changing his mind halfway through his sentence, Sam turned and banged on the door of the handicapped stall to get his brother's attention. "Hey, Dean, you want a gumball?" He waited in the silence for a moment, then knocked again, his brow crinkling as he shot a quick glance at Castiel. "Dean, come on—talk to me." Still nothing. Suddenly Sam's mind was alive with anxiety, and he straightened against the door, pounding harder and wondering why he hadn't noticed the silence before. Shouldn't Dean have been laughing his head off at Castiel's gumball fumble? "Dean," he called through the door, glancing up at the ceiling as if he could somehow see over the barrier. Then he turned and caught Castiel's eyes again, rubbing nervous hands down the legs of his jeans. "Cas, could you—"

Sam had intended his sentence to go something like _Could you try to sense if he's in trouble in there_. He never got the chance to finish. As soon as he spoke Castiel disappeared from in front of him—then there was a bang, as the bottle of water hit the door and rolled to Sam's feet, and Dean's voice exploded out of the stall, his shouts filling the whole bathroom.

"Holy mother of—Cas, get out! Get the fuck outta here!"

With a rustle the angel was back at Sam's elbow. He looked up at the taller hunter with his hands at his sides, unfazed. "Dean is fine," Castiel told him.

"What the hell, Sam?" Dean railed from beyond the door. He sounded pissed—Sam was sure that if his brother had anything else within reach he'd have thrown that, too. "We do not sic crazy awkward angels with personal space issues on people in the john, damn it! And fuck, Cas—we've talked about bathroom time. You should know better, man!"

Castiel sent Sam a confused look, as though Dean had slipped into a dialect he didn't quite understand. The angel's expression of mild bewilderment, more than anything else, transformed Sam's fleeting worry into relieved amusement, and he folded his arms across his chest, shaking his head as he studied the door. "You should have said something, Dean," he replied lightly, a tiny smile touching his lips.

"I shut up for five seconds, that's no reason to—"Dean cut himself off midway as something that sounded suspiciously like a roll of toilet paper bopped against the door. "You know what? Next time you're on the can, I'll send creepy-crawly Cas in to check on your progress. See how _you_ like it, Sam."

Sam sincerely hoped his brother forgot about that threat before he had the chance to carry it out—for more reasons than one.

.x.

Dean always found the weirdest stuff in Vegas.

With a string of apologies that he was positive couldn't be heard over the blaring music, Sam fought his way through the knots of people jam-packed together in this newest club. It was nowhere near Halloween, but nonetheless Dean had somehow managed to lead them to a club that was in full costume party mode—ghosts, vampires and all the rest. Sam wasn't sure why his brother wanted to hang out with fake monsters when they spent so much time with real monsters any given day of the week, but he'd lost Dean right out of the gate before he could even ask. One second his brother was ragging on him for wearing plaid and joking that he'd come as Daisy Duke, and Sam was trying not to have to explain that to the ever-curious angel at his elbow; the next, Dean had vanished into the crowd, which meant they were stranded here until Sam could track him down.

He spent a few minutes trying fruitlessly to move through the thick crowd with Castiel walking so close behind him that Sam could feel the shiver of the angel's breath on his neck—sort of heady territory but a necessary precaution because Castiel was eternally in danger of being dragged off into the dancing fray by any one of the half-dressed girls who seemed to be bizarrely obsessed with his tie, and then Sam would truly be alone. He kept trying to remind himself that Vegas was about Dean, the four words turning over and over in his head like a litany—but after the fifth teen vampire tried to dig plastic fangs into Castiel's neck, Sam decided that Vegas couldn't be about Dean and this club in conjunction, and that his only option was to find his brother and get them out of here as fast as possible. The dance floor shuffle was always easier with one person than with two, so Sam parked Cas at a table along the edge of the room next to a man dressed as Frankenstein and an androgynous mummy and then set off in search of Dean by himself. He finally spotted the back of his brother's head in the middle of the room, under the spinning disco ball.

Sam made his way toward Dean, one hand shoved in the pocket that held their wallets in case anyone tried to help themselves. Once he got closer, he could see that Dean had his mouth glued to that of a short blond girl in a definitely-not-Disney-approved Tinkerbell costume. Sam pulled up a few feet away to give his brother his space and waited. And waited. And waited. It was too packed to lift his arm and check his watch, but Sam could swear five minutes went by before Dean broke the liplock and came up for air, grinning like a new breed of monster. The girl stroked her long pixie-green nails down his cheek, then pushed his head to one side and sauntered off into the crowd, her shoulders glittering under the mirror ball. Dean licked his lips and then made his way over to where Sam was standing, wagging his eyebrows like an asshole. Sam folded his arms across his jacket.

The fact that Dean was an incurable skirt-chaser probably wouldn't have been half so annoying if he wasn't so good at it.

"Dude, you were throwing up, like, twenty minutes ago," Sam said when his brother was finally close enough to hear him.

Dean shrugged, his grin growing, if that were possible, even more wicked. "I know. Had to get the taste out of my mouth. Check it out, Sammy." Dean waited until he had his younger brother's full attention, and then opened his mouth to show off the chewed mass of pink strung between his teeth and the tip of his tongue. "Got her gum," he declared.

Sam screwed up his face and shoved his brother's shoulder, putting a few more inches between himself and the hand-me-down gum. "Dean, that's disgusting."

"No, it's Bubblicious," Dean told him, blessedly pulling the gum back into his mouth. That didn't stop Sam from being grossed out when he started chewing a moment later. Dean noticed his revolted expression and chewed extra hard, opening his mouth partway so Sam could see his jaw working, because he was just that courteous of other people. Sam tried not to give him the satisfaction of gagging.

"Just put it away," he said, seeking somewhere less nasty for his eyes to land. Unfortunately he had a knot of gyrating skeletons on the left and a werewolf trying to suffocate a mermaid with his tongue on the right. He returned his gaze to his brother as soon as Dean tucked the gum into his cheek.

"You're just jealous," Dean told him, somehow managing to grin like a Crest model even though the lump of his gum was packed into one cheek in the style of a lopsided chipmunk. Then his brother lifted one hand and waved a finger in his face, clicking his tongue. "But if you want gum, Sammy, you're gonna have to find your own—no way you're getting this away from me."

Sam wondered if his expression adequately expressed how fucked up that statement was.

A second passed before Dean blinked and screwed up his own face, as if hearing his words for the first time. "Wait, that's not what I meant. I meant—ah, shut up," his brother finished when he noticed the half-pained, half-fatalistic smile that was crossing Sam's lips. Dean reached out and punched Sam's arm hard enough to push him back a step.

Sam rubbed the spot through his jacket. "Hey, you said it, not me," he pointed out.

Dean threw a hand in his direction—Sam decided the gesture was either supposed to mean _seriously shut your mouth_ or _I wish I had a bottle to chuck at you right now_. Fortunately Dean was empty-handed. At least he seemed to be following Sam's advice to give it another half hour before he started cramming alcohol back down his throat.

"Whatever," Dean said decisively, his tone declaring that that was the end of the conversation. Then he moved back to Sam's side and jerked his head at the surrounding crowd. "Hey, where's your boyfriend?"

Dean was a jackass, and Sam refused to let himself or Castiel be the butt of his jokes. "Who?" he asked, feeling stubborn.

Dean rolled his eyes. "Cas, dude—where's Cas?" He made a face at Sam and Sam made one back, wishing it didn't make him feel like a teenager, and then turned back toward the far side of the room, pointing at a cluster of tables.

"He's right—" Sam stopped as his eyes scoured the table where he'd stashed Castiel, occupied now by a group of six or so college kids in pirate hats and low-cut white shirts. There was no conspicuous tan trench coat among them. Even Frankenstein and the mummy had disappeared. Sam sucked in a sharp breath and raked his hands through his hair. "Oh, shit," he finished under his breath, shooting Dean a look before his gaze widened to the rest of the room. "Help me find him."

"We could just call him," Dean suggested, rocking back on his heels with a lazy shrug.

Sam pressed his lips together. "If he tries to appear right here, he'll probably be sitting on somebody. He wouldn't have left the club—come on."

It took Sam another two minutes of searching—even standing up on his tiptoes, which put him about seven inches above most of the crowd—to spot the familiar figure, and for once Sam was really glad that he never had to remember what the angel would be wearing on any given day. Castiel was sort of tucked back into the corner of the club nearest to where Sam and Dean were standing, which was good news—what wasn't such good news was that a girl in a really revealing Catwoman costume was practically pressed up against their errant companion and it looked like Cas was undoing the zipper down the front of her black leather halter top. Sam felt something hot and uncomfortable surging up in his chest at the sight, and there was a good chance he broke a few speed records crossing the room.

When he was finally close, he realized that Catwoman was talking, loudly so that Castiel could hear her over the pounding music. "So what are you supposed to be?" she asked, reaching out and giving the ubiquitous navy tie a flirtatious tug. Castiel glanced at her hand as it slid down one arm of his trench coat. "An accountant?" the girl teased, sending him a lipstick smile.

Castiel peered into her face, stern but informative as always. "I am an angel of the Lord," he said simply. Sam just wished he wasn't pulling down her zipper at the same time.

The girl laughed a little, as though expecting a joke. "An angel?" When Castiel's expression didn't change, she tipped her head back, her fingernails scratching suggestively at the top button of his shirt. "You've got the looks for it, but… where's your halo?"

Castiel's eyes narrowed. "My what?"

Catwoman shrugged. "Your halo? Your angel wings?"

Castiel nodded shortly. "My wings cannot be perceived on this plane of existence," he told her, which made Catwoman laugh again.

"Whatever you say, Constantine." Then she leaned up close to his face, flicking her tongue over her lower lip and pressing her hand over Castiel's where it held her zipper. "Fine. You're an angel? Prove it to me."

Sam was really glad he got there before anybody had to find out what Castiel would do with that challenge.

"Cas!" he called out. Castiel's eyes focused on Sam immediately, and he turned to face him as Sam surged through the last tangle of girls, who were maybe just dressed as strippers, and grabbed the angel's shoulder. He pulled Castiel back a step, relieved beyond words when the zipper slipped from his fingers without sliding any lower. Catwoman looked a little peeved.

"Sam," Castiel greeted, his expression almost maddeningly neutral.

Sam felt his disbelief overtaking his face. "Cas, what's going on?" he asked, jerking his head toward the girl in tight black leather who still hadn't let go of Castiel's tie.

The angel blinked at him. "I was aiding this person," he told Sam flatly, following the younger hunter's gaze back to the pseudo-superhero. "Her zipper was caught and she asked for assistance releasing it."

Sam winced at Castiel's choice of words. Then he spared himself a little curse for leaving the angel unattended in the first place. It shouldn't surprise him that Cas wouldn't have any idea when he was being propositioned—it wasn't like the angel understood the first thing about flirting. The current of regret that followed that thought had Sam pinching the bridge of his nose. Catwoman was still fingering Castiel's tie, and Sam realized he couldn't take his eyes off those long black nails raking down navy blue fabric—and the feeling was painfully familiar, because it wasn't like this was the first time he'd ever been jealous over Castiel. But this was infinitely worse than wishing Dean's guardian angel would give the younger brother a little more attention. Sam tried to unscramble his thoughts long enough to say something polite, at least. "Look—I think this is all a mistake. I'm sorry, but my friend is a little…"

"I think I'm the one who should be sorry," Catwoman told him—but since she took a step toward them instead of away, Sam had a feeling he wasn't getting through yet. The girl gave him a cursory once-over, followed by a little shake of her head. "You're cute, but I don't do parties for three."

Sam hadn't found his tongue yet when Dean finally pushed through the crowd and collided carelessly with his back, throwing a steadying arm over his brother's shoulders. Dean took in the situation at a glance and then gave an enthusiastic whoop, reaching out to slug Castiel in the shoulder.

"Damn, Cas—that's a definite step up. And here I thought you were Sam's date tonight." Dean patted Sam's arm with one hand and sent his brother a ridiculously too pleased grin. "Sorry, Sammy," he said, pulling his mouth down in a mocking frown. "Looks like you're sleeping alone."

Castiel blinked his piercing blue eyes at both Winchesters. "I am not to share Sam's bed?" he asked.

Sam wished they wouldn't do this to him—he really did. Because Dean's jabs were just meant to rib him, but the constant prodding combined with Castiel's total misunderstanding of the situation was like a wall of water pressing up against the already faltering dam of his willpower.

Catwoman's eyes flickered between the three of them for a long moment, sizing them up or something—but she must have decided that they were going to be too much trouble to _help with her zipper_ , because eventually she released Castiel's tie and took a step back, rolling her shoulders in a _win-some-lose-some_ kind of shrug. "Looks like your dance card's full," she said, meeting Castiel's eyes again and curling a strand of black hair around her finger. "You boys have fun." Then she turned and made her way into the crowd, leaving the three of them—or Dean, rather—to watch her walk away.

"Goddamn—whoever invented Spandex, I hope he died happy," Dean said in Sam's ear, ignoring the sour look his brother shot him. Then he raised a hand to his mouth. "Sorry about that, angel!" Dean called after her into the crowd.

Castiel's lips twitched into a puzzled frown, and Sam rolled his eyes, giving his shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "Dean, you know it confuses Cas when you call other people 'angel,'" he admonished. He didn't really hear the words until they were out of his mouth, though, or until a man in a Robin Hood costume and a fake moustache waggled his eyebrows at them—then Sam realized how suggestive that sounded, and he rubbed one hand across his forehead, wishing Dean would choke on his hyena cackle.

"You two could not be any more hilarious if you tried," Dean said, all of his teeth showing through his grin, and Sam noted with some ire that the Robin Hood with the 'stache seemed to be sniggering too. He turned away when the man shot him a thumbs-up. Then Dean was tugging him and Castiel back into the crowd, throwing his head back with wicked joy. "Come on, you crazy kids," he crowed. "Night's just getting started!"

Sam sort of wished that weren't true.

.x.

Sam braced one hand against the top of the open-shelf refrigerator and exchanged stares with the row of Walgreen's premade sandwiches. Living on the road meant that Sam had eaten a lot of weird shit over the course of his life, and premade sandwiches were nowhere near the top of that list—even premade sandwiches that had probably been put together that morning if not two days ago and had been on the shelf of a sort-of-cool refrigerator for hours. Nonetheless, an upset stomach seemed like the last thing he needed right now. Dean never really believed Sam when he said he had a stomachache until he was kneeling over a toilet, and Sam figured they'd all spent enough time in the bathroom for one night.

Walgreen's had seemed like the refueling choice least likely to bite him in the ass. Still, Sam had his doubts.

"Which one will you choose, Sam?"

Sam turned away from the refrigerator to find that Castiel had appeared next to him, looking up at the taller hunter with his usual penetrating gaze. The angel had a souvenir shot glass showing the Eiffel Tower at the Paris Hotel in one loosely fisted hand; Sam wondered if he had found something he wanted to buy or if Castiel had just been examining it and brought it along absently. He made a mental note to check whether the angel still had it before they left the store—they were still working on the concept of shoplifting.

Sam smiled at Cas and nodded his head toward the sandwiches. "Still trying to decide. Which one looks the least dangerous to you?"

Castiel leaned toward the refrigerator, carefully examining in turn the triangle-cut boxes containing tuna and egg salad, ham and Swiss, turkey and cheddar and the ambiguous veggie. Then he turned back to Sam, a wrinkle upsetting his forehead.

"None of them are toxic," he assured him.

Sam shook his head. "I know, Cas. But sometimes even things that aren't all the way to toxic can still make you sick as hell." He regretted the simile immediately—words like _heaven_ and _hell_ tended to confuse the angel out of their literal contexts. But Castiel didn't seem to have noticed, because he only nodded again, his eyes serious.

"Yes. This happened to Dean earlier," he affirmed. Castiel looked out across the store, and Sam followed his gaze to the back of a familiar dirty blond head. They had abandoned Dean between the skin magazines and the condoms; Sam assumed his brother was more interested in the latter, since people were basically handing out free porn on every street corner. Dean had collected a hefty stack of stripper cards so far, even though he insisted he never paid for it.

Thinking about his older brother made Sam roll his eyes, and the gesture drew Castiel's attention back to him. Sam managed a half-indulgent smile as he motioned to the sandwiches. "Well, Dean was sick mostly because he's a complete moron—but yeah, same idea. So any thoughts?"

Castiel gave the sandwiches another piercing stare. Then he pressed his lips together. "It would be best to avoid the ones with mayonnaise."

Sam laughed under his breath. "Yeah, that's probably a good call." He studied the shelf for another moment, then grabbed the turkey and cheddar triangles—turkey seemed slightly less dangerous than ham. Then he stepped away from the refrigerator, ambling back in Dean's direction with the angel at his side. "Do you want anything to eat, Cas?" he asked belatedly, jerking a thumb over his shoulder.

Castiel did not answer at first, distracted by the display of shot glasses; Sam was glad to see that the angel's hand was empty as they moved slowly away into the row of chips and party mix. "I do not require nourishment," he replied offhandedly, the way he always did, and Sam felt his lips twitch up into a sort of rueful smile, because that was the response he'd expected, the response he almost always got when he offered Castiel things that only humans needed. Castiel ran his fingers over the whole line of multicolored Pringles cans, and Sam considered that for a moment before deciding that the contact was more curious than anything, and remembering ultimately that Castiel probably didn't even know what Pringles were. Then he realized the angel was staring at him, awaiting a response, and he shrugged, his lips settling into an absent smile.

"Okay. Well, if you change your mind, you can have a bite of my sandwich."

"Yes," Castiel agreed, his eyes raking thoughtfully over the boxed sandwich in Sam's hand. Then the angel caught himself, and he shook his head, his expression pinched as if in deep regret. "No. I'm supposed to say thank you." Before Sam could really process the action, Castiel had reached out and wrapped both of his hands around Sam's and the sandwich, squeezing gently as he stared into his companion's hazel eyes. "Thank you for the offer, Sam," Castiel said sincerely. The last hour had been so chaotic Sam had almost forgotten his preoccupation with the angel's hands, but now that they were on his it felt like every nerve below his wrists was firing too fast, relishing the heat rising from the angel's skin. Sam ducked his head over a laugh.

"It's fine, Cas. Really—it's just a sandwich," he assured the angel. Still, he found that he was smiling; it was nice to know that, whatever Dean grumbled to the contrary, Cas was making an effort to learn. Sam laid his second hand over Castiel's and squeezed back, tipping his head to one side. "But you're welcome, okay? Anytime you want a bite of anything—just let me know."

Castiel opened his mouth as if to say something else. Before he could, a voice Sam knew better than his own soared across the store.

"Hey, lover boy!"

Sam jerked his hands reflexively away from Castiel's, turning to locate his brother with a glare. Dean was still half a store away, which meant his idiot brother was addressing everybody in Walgreen's instead of just Sam—that didn't seem to bother Dean, though, if his smile was any indication. Dean sent Sam a hearty thumbs-up, jerking his chin down to indicate his aisle.

"Good news, Sammy," he called, nodding the way he did whenever he found himself particularly hilarious. "I know you didn't come prepared, but if this winds up being a special night for you…" Dean disappeared for a moment behind the shelf, then popped up again brandishing a bright red lace bra on a plastic hanger, which he swung mortifyingly back and forth. "…Walgreen's got you covered. I think they've even got your size."

Dean gave a laugh that was somewhere between a snicker and a guffaw, and Sam mouthed a few choice words to his brother, hoping his ears weren't flushing too badly from the angelic gaze he could just _feel_ boring into his face. The sheer number of times Dean had felt the need to joke about him and Cas in a way Sam knew was supposed to be humiliating was proof positive that it was on Dean's mind, and that he wanted the very idea squarely in the box with unicorns and socialized healthcare and all those other things that simply could not exist. But the whole thing was starting to wear on Sam in a very real way—because he wasn't ashamed of how he felt, and it wasn't like he wasn't with Castiel because of his brother's lame-ass jokes. It just wasn't ever going to happen, and without even intending to Dean was rubbing salt in that wound every time he opened his mouth. Dean wasn't even rejecting them—he was rejecting the very _possibility_ of them, and Sam wasn't sure if it hurt worse to be dismissed so completely, or if the hurt was because Dean was so right.

A few more deep, boisterous laughs erupted near the wall at the end of his aisle. For a horrifying moment, Sam thought that Dean had taken the next step from public humiliation to actually getting the bystanders involved in the joke—but then he realized that the three young men who had laughed, huddled in a group shoving and taunting each other, weren't looking at him at all, but instead up at a wall hung with dozens of novelty t-shirts. Castiel followed his gaze to the little cluster, then glanced back at Dean, his eyes eventually settling on Sam's face as he frowned.

"Are you upset, Sam?"

Sam took a deep breath, wiping his expression of whatever hint of frustration had shown through and schooling his features into a vague smile instead. "No, Cas, I'm just…Dean's just being a douchebag," he finished, reminding himself again that Vegas was for Dean, and the longer he could have a good attitude about this, the better it would go for everyone. Castiel looked like he might push the point, but just then the young men moved away and one of the shirts that had been hidden behind them caught Sam's attention, drawing him down the aisle toward the shirts. Sam reached out and touched the deep black cotton, a more genuine smile rising to his lips. "Hey. I should buy this shirt for Dean."

Castiel had followed him dutifully down the aisle, and he reached out as well, tracing with one fingertip the brilliant yellow lettering that proclaimed _One Tequila, Two Tequila, Three Tequila, FLOOR_. "Do you think he would wear it?" Castiel asked. Sam laughed a little in spite of himself.

"Never. But maybe we could drape it over his prone body, once he goes down." Sam was pleased to see that Castiel's lips had curved up at that—just the hint of a smile, but on his normally serious face it was a big change. Sam felt his own smile getting wider in response. He turned back to the wall of t-shirts. "Or we could get him this one," he suggested, pointing out a bright red shirt with an equation declaring _Boy + Girl x (Alcohol)_ _4_ _= Love_.

Castiel tipped his head to one side. "That seems to be the formula Dean uses," he remarked, which made Sam laugh again. He turned around to seek out his brother, and noticed that Dean was staring at them from the lingerie aisle, a basic all-purpose _what the hell_ expression on his face; he sent Sam a gesture that meant about the same thing, but Sam just shrugged, not willing just yet to let Dean spoil the joke. He was distracted from the nonverbal sparring match by a tap on his shoulder.

"Sam. What is the meaning of this shirt?"

Sam turned around again to find that Castiel had lifted a shirt down from the wall and was scrutinizing it carefully, his intense gaze searing into the fabric. This shirt was black, too, with block figures of a boy and a girl in white, each of them marked with a red heart, the girl's correctly placed over her chest and the boy's… well, lower. Sam coughed a little as those intense blue eyes rose to meet his.

"Um… it's a joke about love, Cas." The angel stared at Sam with an unchanged blank expression, and Sam decided not for the first time that he really needed to find a better way of explaining things that had their roots in what were basically cultural inside jokes. The young man set his sandwich carefully down on the corner of a shelf, then raked his hands back through his hair, taking a deep breath. "Yeah. So um… you know how I said anything you can buy on a street corner in Vegas isn't love?"

Castiel nodded gravely. "Dean disagreed."

"Don't listen to Dean," Sam found himself saying automatically, then lifted a mollifying hand, hoping to adjust that statement before Cas carved it in stone. "I mean, not about everything, but just… about love. And some other things. But that's not…" Sam hesitated, chewing absently on his bottom lip. In some ways he had wanted to have this conversation with Castiel so many times, but not standing in a crummy Walgreens in Las Vegas staring at a bad shirt. "What I'm trying to say is, there's this sort of idea that women fall in love with their hearts and men fall in love with their…"

Sam had been living with Dean far too long to be shy about any of the words that should have gone in that blank—but somehow, exchanging stares with a rumpled angel of the Lord in a long beige trench coat, he couldn't get any of them out. Sam exhaled hard.

"That men just want to sleep with someone." Castiel blinked at him, and Sam bit the bullet, keeping his voice low so Dean couldn't hear them, at least. "It means have sex, Cas. Men just want to have sex."

Castiel turned his gaze back to the shirt, regarding the wrinkle-free fabric with a stare so long he might have been looking right through it. "Sex is not love," the angel postulated, looking at Sam for approval.

Sam felt himself coloring, that familiar heat burning in his cheeks again. "Well, they're not mutually exclusive…" One glance proved that he was about to confuse Castiel beyond all hope of ever untangling things, so Sam scrapped the rest of that discussion and did his best to simplify the issue, burying his hands in the pockets of his jeans. "Look, all you really need to know is… love doesn't happen in your pants. Okay? Does that make sense, Cas?" he added after a second. The angel looked back at the shirt.

"And women understand this better than men," Castiel hypothesized. Sam could almost see the wheels spinning in his head, working to line up this new information with his interpretation of the four symbols.

Sam cleared his throat. "Uh… yeah, in general, that's probably true," he said.

"And you," Castiel pressed, making eye contact again.

Sam tried to keep how badly those words had shaken him from showing on his face, though he couldn't help shifting under the intensity of that stare. "I guess."

Castiel nodded to himself. "Because you are Julia Roberts," he finished.

Sam had gotten used to the idea that sometimes it took Cas a little longer to circle around to the point he was trying to make—still, he felt like he'd been socked in the jaw by a serious non sequitur, and he blinked about three times, leaning toward the angel as if the words might make more sense from closer in. "Wait, what?"

Castiel narrowed his eyes—his standard expression when he didn't understand something very well himself. "That is what Dean said. You are mistaken about love because you are Julia Roberts in _Pretty Woman_." The angel tipped his head to one side, looking quizzical. "This is related to your time in college."

Sam opened and closed his mouth like a fish a few times without saying anything. He was struck by the sudden impression of Cas as the faulty receiver on the world's most screwed-up game of telephone, every message getting mangled somewhere along the line. Some other time he'd have to figure out what Dean had actually said about him and Julia Roberts—he was sure it hadn't been _positive_ , anyway—but for now he decided to focus on the molehill in front of him, before Castiel pushed it up into a mountain.

"Yeah, um—never mind about that, Cas. Just… look." Sam rocked back on his heels, searching for words that would make sense to an angel. "When you're in love, you want to know somebody—and not just, you know, Biblically." Castiel's eyes narrowed, but Sam rushed on, intent on getting it all out before Dean wandered over—he really didn't need a peanut gallery for this. "When you love someone, you really care about them and you… you want them to be happy. When you're just trying to get laid, it's all about you and… you usually get drunk first." Sam paused for breath and fought down a wince, pushing his tongue out against his teeth. "Did that make any sense at all?"

Castiel didn't say anything for a moment, taking Sam's face apart feature by feature in that way he had. Then the angel slipped his free hand into the pocket of his long coat, copying Sam's posture. "Have you ever been in love, Sam?" Castiel asked softly.

Sam's heart burst like a firework in his chest, and for one breathless instant he wanted to fantasize that Castiel had asked him that because he was trying to tell Sam something, because this was the scene in a movie where the music picked up, and whether it was Walgreens or the top of the Eiffel Tower everything in the world got beautiful for a minute—wanted to pretend that he was going to answer honestly because Cas wanted an honest answer. But the answers Cas was looking for weren't really about Sam—he was an angel, searching for knowledge, and this was just one more hole he was trying to fill. Sam looked down at his shoes for a minute, weighing all the possible answers. Then he found Castiel's face again and gave a little shrug. "There are all kinds of love, Cas," he said, holding his eyes. "I've loved a lot of people."

Castiel considered that in silence. Sam gave him a moment to turn it over, casting his gaze out across the store—he could see that Dean had finally gotten bored with the novelties aisle and was making his way toward them, juggling what was no doubt a box of condoms that he wouldn't use nearly all of, because Dean wasn't half as good as he claimed he was. Then there was a light touch on his shoulder, and Sam turned back to find Castiel nodding at him, his blue eyes somehow much more serene than they had seemed a moment before.

"I understand, Sam," the angel told him. Then Castiel reached out and hung the shirt back on the wall, eyeing the black fabric for a brief moment before his gaze returned to Sam. "Love is selflessness," Castiel decided, his expression neutral once again.

Sam opened his mouth to explain that that didn't really have anything to do with the shirt, and that it wasn't really the distinction he'd been trying to make between drunken flings and feelings that started above the waist. In the end, though, he didn't say anything, as Dean appeared beside them and braced a careless elbow on Sam's shoulder—because really, Castiel was probably right anyway, and if the angel could hold onto that… well, Sam only wished the whole thing always made that much sense to him. He couldn't help wondering if Castiel had understood that sort of inherently, before he and Dean and Vegas and novelty t-shirts made a mess of things.

"What are you guys looking at?" Dean wanted to know, reaching out to smack Castiel's arm very irreverently with the box of Golden Bull condoms. "You've been over here for like fifteen minutes."

Castiel's gaze strayed over Sam's face, and it looked to Sam like the angel was making up his mind about something, the gears whirring behind his sharp blue eyes. Then he reached out and pulled the tequila shirt down from the wall, holding it out for Dean's inspection.

"This shirt is about you," Castiel told him flatly.

Dean screwed up his face. "What? I am nowhere near that lightweight, Cas. I've put down three times that already tonight."

"It did not end well for you," the angel reminded him.

The look on Dean's face was kind of funny, the way he wrinkled his nose as he had to admit that celestial beings had it all over the mortal community when it came to holding their liquor. But that wasn't really what made Sam grin. It had a lot more to do with the conversation he had just shared with Castiel, which felt a little like a secret, and a little bit to do with the tiny smile the angel was sending him, like he knew it, too.

.x.

Dean still wasn't drunk.

He had been, sure, for about five glorious minutes earlier that night. But of course that had all gone right down the crapper—literally. That whole experience had sucked balls; roiling guts were one thing, but that added to half an hour crunched over a casino toilet radiating Lysol fumes while Sam nagged and bitched at him through the door, and then their disaster of a guardian angel actually appearing in the stall while Dean's pants were around his ankles—yeah, not the highlight of his night. It wasn't fair, either, because he'd manned up and had that conversation with Cas only about eight months ago. It had been the most torturous forty seconds of Dean's life to that point, Hell included—until the one and a half seconds tonight when Cas had violated the sacredness of bathroom time and hadn't even had the grace to look surprised that Dean was doing his business and blatantly pantsless. Dean wished that bottle of water had broken his nose.

But all of that suck was in the past, and Dean was never going to think about it again—unless he needed to pull it up later tonight to wheedle something out of Sam. The point was that Dean had made it back to tipsy but he was nowhere near drunk, and not even _close_ to as shitfaced as he needed to be for where they were right now.

"You said you wanted to see a show at the Bellagio," Dean complained. "You didn't say you were taking me to fucking Holland."

Dean had been hoping for hot girls in bikinis—or more likely, knowing Sam, music or a play or some crap like that. But people, anyway. He hadn't been prepared for a huge ballroom filled with bank after bank of flowers, not to mention an old-style windmill and bee sculptures the size of ATVs, and some enormous fake swans swimming in a fake river. Dean looked up at a buttercup twice his height and then back at his brother, and shook his head, because words alone could never express just how wrong this was.

"Seriously, Sam? Flowers? That's what you wanted to see?"

"I told you it was a flower show," Sam insisted, as if that somehow made it okay that they were looking at plants right now instead of girls who got paid to look great naked. Dean shook his head again. He didn't know where he'd gone so wrong with Sam—he'd gotten him a skin mag for his fourteenth birthday just like any awesome older brother would, but somehow it hadn't helped.

"You're just lucky I've met some of the girls you've slept with, or I'd be sure you were gay," Dean told him. Sam's _what the fuck_ expression meant that hadn't made as much sense out loud as it did in his head, so Dean tried to remember what his little brother had actually said last. Oh yeah, _flower show_. "And anyway, I thought that was a metaphor," Dean added. "Who goes to see flowers—like actual flowers—in Las Vegas?" He jerked his thumb over his shoulder at the biggest atrocity of all: a big fruity carousel complete with the tinkly music and the happy unicorns spinning in a fucking circle. "Seriously, Sam. Three hundred bars in this town, and first chance you get to pick the entertainment you go all Alice in Wonderland on me?" This place had giant mushrooms, for crying out loud— _giant foam mushrooms_. If he wasn't so damn sober Dean would've thought he was wasted.

Sam's bitchface was out in full force as Dean's little brother rolled his eyes and then brushed past him, slipping away into the flower power crowd with a mumbled "Whatever, Dean." They were going to have to work on that back talk.

"Hey, if you see that caterpillar with the hookah, you send him my way, all right?" Dean shouted at his snippy brother's retreating back—and maybe a few people gave him the crazy eye, but whatever; it wasn't like there was anything to ruin here. "I am nowhere near high enough to be here!" Dean called after his brother into the crowd. Sam blew him off with a wave of one hand. Maybe one finger—Sam was too out of focus to tell.

Well, wasn't that just _Samantha_ all over.

The farther Dean wandered into the flower apocalypse—because flowers weren't a _show_ , damn it, and they never would be—the more screwed up everything got. He realized that the enormous flower heads hanging from the ceiling were painted on the backs of umbrellas, which was maybe the biggest waste of a hundred umbrellas Dean could think of right at that moment, and he felt like the biggest swan was staring at him, its beady eyes tracking him down the path. Dean flipped it off. He wished he'd packed a beer along, or another enormous margarita—anything to take the edge off this colossal waste of time—but all he had was a bright orange gumball, which Cas had won gambling or something—Dean hadn't really gotten the full story.

He was chewing on that as he came up to the carousel and realized that he had just bumped into a familiar angel in a trench coat. Castiel was standing in the middle of the traffic flow with all his usual oblivion and staring at the carousel like he'd never seen one before. Which, hey.

Dean stopped about even with Castiel and leaned one elbow on the angel's shoulder, because he was tired of having to hold his own limbs up. It should be somebody else's turn by now.

"What can I say, Cas?" Dean started, letting out a long sigh. "My brother's a little girl."

Castiel turned and gave Dean one of his _sometimes you're so confusing I want to crush your skull and poke around in there to see what the hell's going on_ looks—Sam said Cas didn't make faces like that, but Dean knew what he saw when he saw it. He stared right back. At last the angel broke eye contact and went back to watching the ponies, his eyebrows drawn together in the classic visitor-from-another-planet expression.

"What is that?" Castiel asked.

Dean rolled his eyes. "It's a carousel, Cas. They have 'em at carnivals and stuff. Sometimes kids ride on them." Then Dean had a great thought, and he elbowed Castiel in the side, shoving his hands down into his pockets and settling the gumball in one cheek. "Hey, if we ever go to a fair or whatever, you and Sam should absolutely go on the carousel. It's like Sammy's favorite ride of all time." Castiel sent him another dubious look, and Dean bit down on his grin, nodding gravely at the biggest sucker in a city of suckers. "Better believe it. And you gotta get him on a pink horse, okay? He pretends he doesn't, but he likes the pink ones best. Always has." Dean hoped he would still remember he'd had this phenomenal idea once he was sober.

Castiel didn't look wholly convinced, but Dean wasn't worried about it—it was pretty easy to talk Cas into doing stupid, embarrassing stuff even spur of the moment. He needed to take advantage of that more often. Sometimes it was the only part of the angel's personality that didn't drive him nuts. Then Dean sort of realized that Castiel was talking; he tried to tune in, though his ears were tingling.

"…Sam enjoys places like this," the angel was saying. He turned to look at Dean, which Dean was going to assume meant there had been a question in there somewhere—but Cas was a convoluted sonofabitch, so there was just as good a chance that Dean wouldn't have understood it even if he had been listening. He decided to freewheel it.

"Hey, you don't have to tell me, man. I've been road-tripping it with Sammy since we were tiny, and he's always liked lame-ass stuff like this. You know how many times I've seen the Getty Museum? Like _that's_ why people go to L.A." Castiel narrowed his eyes in his best Sam impression, and God if that wasn't just adorable—his brother and his angel were both a pain in the ass. Dean chewed hard on the gumball and turned back to the carousel. "Or like this thing. You know what would make this worth seeing? If there were strippers on the horses. Then it'd be like one of those sushi boat restaurants—"

Dean turned back to Castiel with a grin on his face appropriate to how awesome that idea really was—and damn, if Dean didn't have enough on his plate maybe he would've started a stripper/sushi boat franchise, because that could _go_ places—but Castiel was nowhere in sight. Dean blinked at the spot where the angel had been, then scanned the crowd for him. It was rude, was what it was, Cas taking off whenever he felt like it—and there he was, the traitor, standing next to Dean's gigantic brother in front of the windmill, probably asking about that now.

"Well, fuck you, too," Dean muttered to himself, and popped a huge orange bubble.

Since he didn't have anything better to do, because he sure as hell wasn't going to walk around looking at _flowers_ , Dean stayed next to the carousel, watching it and then looking over at Sam and Cas and back because both directions were equally dull. After a minute he realized that somebody was standing next to him again—a semi-hot college-aged chick in a long blue t-shirt that read _You look like I'd need another drink first_ , which was basically how Dean felt about her. She had a camera in one hand and one of those two-foot margaritas in the other, and she looked up at him with a totally plastered smile as she held them both out toward the carousel, nodding like they'd been talking to each other.

"It's like I just can't get the carousel _and_ my margarita to stay in focus, you know?" she said, jiggling the camera.

Dean didn't think that was the problem here. But then he thought about it, and realized he couldn't really remember what the problem was—so why not that? Dean shrugged and gave her a charming smile.

"I hear ya, sister," he said. He looked out across the room, picking out Sam and Castiel again—they were by the swans now, and Sam was pointing at something, explaining God knew what to the omnipotent being who was supposed to know everything. Dean rolled his eyes, and found that he was smiling, sort of; because it was stupid, and a waste of money even though it was free, and they hadn't been to nearly enough bars yet, but whatever—Sam loved girly things like this, and Dean decided he could put up with it for another ten minutes. What were older brothers for, after all.


	4. Nightfall

**Looking for Love in Las Vegas**

**Part IV: Nightfall**

Sam had never been a big fan of club dancing.

Dean had his stories, sure—Sam drunk dancing to terrible songs and dancing on the pool table once and breaking a lamp with his head, and the one really messed up time, the first time Dean ever got him wasted, when he'd tried to get his brother to dance with him to that awful Eiffel 65 "I'm blue _da-ba-di da-ba-day_ " song—Dean held it over him for like a year, but Sam maintained there was a reason sixteen-year-olds weren't supposed to get drunk. And all those bad experiences were probably part of it—but end of the day, Sam just had never taken to dancing in a public setting. Maybe it was his height, maybe it was his long limbs, maybe it was just _him_ , but somehow Sam always felt like he was the most awkward person on the dance floor.

He wasn't tonight.

Sam felt warm breath against the back of his neck as Castiel leaned up to speak into his ear. "This seems to be a very circuitous route to the bar," the angel pointed out, eyeing the press of bodies that had closed around them like a noose the second they stepped onto the dance floor. Sam offered him a pained smile, trying to tear his focus away from the warmth of the other man pressing into his back.

"I know it seems that way, Cas, but we're actually making good time compared to the people on the edges." He met those piercing blue eyes for a second before he had to turn back toward the fray. "Come on. Just stay close, okay?"

Cas seemed to have the _close_ down, at any rate.

The last hour, they'd settled into a pattern: the three of them would walk into a bar, Dean would vanish so fast it was like he was apparating, and after ten minutes or longer Sam would find him either glued to some girl's face or downing shots at the bar—sometimes both almost simultaneously. Once Dean felt like he'd conquered the place, they moved on, and the cycle started again. Sam had volunteered that he and Cas could just hang out at one place and wait for him if Dean wanted to barhop by himself for a while, but apparently it just wasn't the same if he and Castiel weren't around to see Dean proving himself, i.e. slaying a pint of beer or a tray of tequila and getting the girl wherever he went. By now, though, it wasn't like he could leave Dean either way—his brother had successfully made it back to well and truly smashed.

Even Dean could get rolled, after all.

That wasn't the problem right now, though. The problem was that in this particular club, there was no way to get from the door to the bar without crossing the dance floor, and the dance floor itself was packed like a vat of sardines, so the only way to get across was to turn sideways and sort of shimmy through. Sam wasn't doing a great job of sliding through the dancers himself, but Cas couldn't have been stiffer if he was frozen solid. And Castiel was achingly close to him, but he wasn't close in the way Sam wanted; the one time Cas put his hands on Sam's hips to steady him Sam couldn't even focus on how right that contact felt, because he was terrified that they were two seconds away from the becoming the engine of the Love Train. He wished he could find it in himself to just ditch Dean back, because if it was just him and Cas he could turn around and face the angel, and then…well, Sam wasn't sure what he'd do then, but he knew it would be a hell of a lot better than what he was doing now. But his brother was out there somewhere, lost in the strobes that were giving him a headache, so the only thing he could do was press on, and try not to think too hard about how perfectly Castiel fit up against his back.

Sam finally broke through the human wall and stepped out into the more breathable bar area, managing a strained smile for the last girl who'd stepped on his foot before he escaped. When he turned back to see if Castiel had made it, though, he almost startled out of his skin—Castiel was still right behind him, staring up at Sam with his customary blank expression from only about half an inch away.

"Dancing is a strange activity," the angel told him. Sam kind of wished those weren't the first words Cas has ever breathed onto his lips.

He let out a long breath and stepped back to give himself some room. "Yeah, I wouldn't really consider that dancing."

Castiel gave him a baffled look. "Those people are not dancing?" he asked, tipping his head toward the chaos at their backs. Sam sort of wished Cas's eyes hadn't landed on a particularly friendly couple who were maybe attempting the tango, except Sam didn't remember the part of the tango where the girl turned around and the choreography gave way to senseless gyrating. They were pressed about as close together as he and Cas had been, and that was disconcerting, too. Sam dragged his gaze back to the angel, wondering if his molten face could be blamed on the club lights.

"Um…so there's—there's this kind of dancing, which is sort of, you know…" Sam trailed off, unable to find it in himself to say the word _foreplay_ to an angel of the Lord. "But in real dancing—good dancing—you're more like….talking distance apart. You know what I mean?" Castiel said nothing, his mildly puzzled expression reminding Sam how stupid it was to end that with a question. He tried again. "Okay. So, this is a pretty good talking distance, right?" he started, gesturing between them. The angel didn't react even a little as Sam stepped forward into his space again, though he couldn't bring himself to get all the way in Castiel's face. "But this is…a little too close, you know? It's better to be sort of…here." Sam stepped back again and sent Castiel a little smile.

The angel did nothing but peer up at him with those sharp blue eyes for a minute, and Sam almost expected him to disappear or something, fed up with these human games. But then Castiel's gaze dropped to the red glittering tiles under their feet, and his eyebrows drew together, like he was carefully measuring the distance between their shoes. "I shouldn't stand any closer than this," he said, looking up to Sam for confirmation.

Sam looked at the space between their feet, too—and suddenly it seemed a little wrong, slightly too far for a normal conversation with a close friend. Sam shuffled in a few inches. "Maybe it's more like…" But that didn't feel right either. Sam knew he could only be confusing the hell out of Castiel, but he couldn't help wavering back and forth a few centimeters at a time, bracing one hand against Cas's shoulder to help him gauge the distance. Nothing really felt right, though, now that he was thinking about it, and after stepping in and out about eight times, Sam had to admit defeat. He looked back up at Castiel and gave a short laugh, shrugging under his light shirt. "Uh… sorry. It's somewhere in there. Does that sort of… almost make sense?"

Again Castiel didn't answer right away. He spent a few long seconds studying their feet and Sam's hand on his shoulder; Sam felt like he should drop it, but the angel was scrutinizing it so thoroughly that he wasn't sure if Castiel needed it as a reference point or something. Then Castiel raised an uncertain hand to touch Sam's shoulder in the same place and looked up at him with a troubled expression.

"I apologize, Sam," Castiel said, shaking his head. "I have been closer to you than this on several occasions."

"Oh, no—Cas, don't worry about it," Sam said, hurrying to shore up the edges of the conversation before he capsized the boat and had to explain to Dean why Castiel wasn't getting within a foot of anybody anymore. "With me… it's fine. I mean, it really all depends on how comfortable you are being close to someone. Or how close you want to be to them." Sam wondered, not for the first time, if he was a masochist, setting himself up in the situation where he would have to push Cas away over and over, even though it was the last thing he wanted to do—but it was too late to take it back, and Cas was off and running with it already, his hand softening against Sam's shoulder.

"I do not dislike being close to you, Sam," the angel told him with a perfectly straight face.

In the end, Sam knew Castiel was going to be his undoing—because Dean's jokes were just that, jokes, but Cas was dead serious when he said these things…he just didn't mean them the way Sam wished he did. "Yeah, no, I… I like being close to you, too, Cas," Sam found himself saying, fumbling the words because his tongue felt too big for his mouth all of a sudden. In the end, he was spared having to stop that runaway conversation, if spared was the right word, when a warm hand landed suddenly on his other shoulder, making Sam jump so high he was shocked he didn't bang his head on the ceiling. He spun around to find that Dean had appeared beside them, his face etched in a baffled grin.

"What the hell are you guys doing?" Dean asked, glancing between Sam and Castiel with his eyebrows reaching for his hairline. "I've been waving at you from the bar for like five minutes." He looked between them again, and at Sam's hand on the angel's shoulder, and then his eyes narrowed, his face contorting like he'd tasted something bizarre and probably rotten. "Are you guys over here… dancing?"

Sam couldn't stop himself from taking a step back. "No," he replied, a little too fast maybe.

"Not anymore," Castiel said at the same time.

Dean whistled under his breath. "Jesus, Sammy," he drawled, shaking his head slowly back and forth. "I knew you were desperate, but I didn't know you were _that_ desperate," he said, motioning to Cas as he said the last. The angel cocked his head to one side, lost as usual.

Sam caved to the weird look Dean was giving them and dropped his hand from Castiel's shoulder, but even as he did, he felt a retort burning on the back of his tongue—because how _desperate_ did you really have to be to want to end up with a handsome, respectful, well-mannered person like Cas who didn't go use their tongue to go cave diving in their date's mouth and steal their gum? "Shut up, Dean," he grumbled, but it was such a half-assed comeback he sort of wished he hadn't said anything.

Dean just laughed in his face. "That's hilarious. I don't even know who I would feel sorry for." Then he shook Sam's arm and dragged him toward the far end of the bar, Castiel trailing automatically in their wake. "Here, Sammy—this'll cheer you up. The waitress who's on shift right now—hot as jalapeños, man, swear to God—she's letting me do tequila shots off her stomach. You can take a turn."

That was gross in some way Sam couldn't really explain, and he drew back out of Dean's hold, the needle on his internal pressure valve swaying as he tried to decide whether it was time to break it to Dean that his interest in hot young women had taken an abrupt nosedive, and recently the only people he really noticed were men with dark hair and striking blue eyes, like the man with a chiseled jaw who'd brushed past him on the dance floor and muttered a gruff _sorry_ under his breath. There was the torture of the teasing, arguing, disbelief and then the eternal joking at his expense if he went with honesty, but he wasn't totally sure how much better it was to have Dean flinging these women at him for the rest of the night—or possibly for the rest of his life.

He hadn't made up his mind yet when they pulled up short at the bar counter and Castiel bumped into him from behind. The soft warmth of the angel's hands against his back steadying him distracted Sam long enough for his brother to get the first word in.

"Three," Dean told the bartender, nodding a gruff thanks as the balding, clean-cut man behind the counter set out three shots and poured a full measure of golden liquor in each. The skinny brunette in a triangle bikini who was perched on a stool behind the bar, her legs crossed like a pretzel, gave Sam a once-over. Sam sort of winced back.

"Uh, thanks, but… my friend and I don't need one," Sam told the bartender, shooting Dean a dirty look because he'd already reminded his brother more than he never wanted to get shitfaced drunk in Vegas again—especially not in front of Castiel. Dean rolled his eyes and jerked his head toward the angel at Sam's back—Sam wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean, though, so he ignored him, turning back to the counter and giving the bartender an apologetic smile.

The bartender quirked an eyebrow. "Not interested in a shot?" he asked, though he pointed at the girl next to him instead of the shot glass as he said it.

Sam blinked and focused on smiling. "We're just here with him," he said, gesturing to his idiot sibling.

"No, they're not here with me," Dean snorted as he picked up the first shot and downed it with a satisfied hiss. "They're here with each other."

Sam turned far enough to give his brother the _enough is enough_ look that Dean earned so often somehow when he was drunk—but he was distracted from hating his brother by the bartender clearing his throat. Sam was a little disturbed when he looked up and realized that the man had been looking brazenly between him and Castiel, like he was sizing them both up. Then he shrugged.

"Well, it's not really regulation—but if one of you wants to get up on the bar, I could overlook it," he said, his face as blank as if he'd been saying it was raining in Seattle. Sam wanted to sink through the floor as the man's gaze settled on him, but not because he would never consider it—the mortification was because he had. The bartender crooked one eyebrow. "How about you, shorty? Give your boyfriend a night to remember?"

Sam honestly hoped his brother would choke and die on the sip of tequila he was hacking out all over the bar.

.x.

Something was bothering Sam.

Castiel was far from fluent in understanding what the small changes to the younger Winchester's expression and body posture meant; sometimes he doubted he ever would be, since Sam had a penchant for keeping the most important things buried inside himself. But it seemed as though Sam's well-being was often, now, at the forefront of his mind, and he had spent long enough observing Sam to recognize the emotion cloaked in many of his subtle movements. It hadn't escaped his notice that, since they had settled into a table at this most recent bar, taking the break that Sam and Dean had disagreed about for the entire walk from the last establishment, Sam had pinched the bridge of his nose four times and thrice squeezed his eyes closed, and once reached up to massage his temples with his fingertips. These were all motions that Sam made when he was troubled, or when his patience was wearing thin.

The angel suspected Dean was the cause of the aggravation he sensed in Sam. He was certainly aggravating Castiel.

"All right—next round!" Dean announced, falling into the chair beside Sam's with three glasses carefully balanced in his hands. He set them down and then looked up at his companions with a grin, one of those that Castiel had come to recognize meant Dean was greatly entertaining himself. "So let's see… for Sammy, we've got Sex on the Beach," Dean proclaimed, pushing a tall glass brimming with orange liquor across the table to his brother. Sam rolled his eyes. "And for the nerdy angel in a trench coat… a Screaming Orgasm. And I get the Redheaded Slut."

Castiel narrowed his eyes as a smaller glass (Dean had called it a shooter) appeared on his side of the table, its contents transitioning from light to dark brown liquid in perfectly clear layers; the angel recognized the artistry, but the name made him lean back a few inches in his seat. Dean laughed at his obnoxious drunken volume.

"I thought about just getting you a regular Orgasm, Cas," the hunter told him, pressing his lips together in an attempt to keep from smiling. His effort did not succeed. "But I figured, what the heck—you've never had one before, might as well go all the way, right?"

Castiel frowned at him. Sam reached up and pinched the bridge of his nose for the fifth time. "Dean, don't be a dick," he said, sending his brother a sharp look.

Dean scoffed. "Hey, you guys sent me up to the bar without drink orders—you can't call dealer's choice and then complain about it later." He lifted his own shot glass, filled with a brilliant red cocktail, and tapped it twice against the table. "I thought about getting you another Blow Job, Sam, but I know the sixteen-year-old girl in you is dying for some 1950s romance." Dean emptied his glass in one swallow.

Castiel glanced at Sam as the younger Winchester took a deep breath, closing his eyes for a few seconds. His forehead was creased now, as if he were holding something back with physical effort; then Sam sighed and pushed his glass back across the table in the direction of his brother, his hazel eyes locked on Dean's.

"I didn't say dealer's choice, Dean—I said I didn't want anything. And so did Cas." Sam swept the shot glass away from the angel as well. Castiel sent him a slight nod in appreciation. "We're done with the cocktail sampler, okay?" Sam told him.

Dean rolled his eyes. "You were the one who wanted to park it here instead of going to see the bikini bull-riding. _Bikini bull-riding_ , Sammy—I've never been to a show where at least one girl didn't end up topless. But like the tremendous buzz kill you are, you wanted to sit here instead."

Sam lifted both hands and pressed his palms to his face, dragging his fingertips across his eyelids. Castiel watched the movement with a small frown. "Yes, I wanted to sit here," Sam replied, exchanging stares with his brother through the slats in his fingers. "I didn't say I wanted to go through the entire cocktail menu in half an hour. Moderation, Dean—heard of it?" Then Sam seemed to catch the hard edge to his tone that Castiel had noticed as well, and he sunk back in his chair, rubbing circles into the hair at his temples. "Look… I don't want to argue with you about this. Can we just—take a break for five minutes? Please?"

Castiel was certain now that something more was bothering Sam—it would have been difficult to miss the way Sam was digging his fingernails into the skin at his temples, just a light pressure but strong enough to leave tiny red crescents. Dean did not seem to notice. The older Winchester threw his head back in exaggerated surrender, and then pushed his chair away from the table, standing up and swallowing the cocktail intended for Castiel in one rough motion. The angel wasn't sorry to see it disappear.

"Fine. You know what? I could use a break, too." Now it was Dean who looked annoyed, and he gestured over his shoulder toward the other end of the bar, his shoulders pulled stiff underneath his leather jacket. "There's some kids playing darts in the back—I'm gonna go whip their asses for whatever cash they haven't drunk yet. You can sit here and cry about spending an awesome night in the coolest city in America with your kickass older brother. And on my way back, I'll bring you a Shirley Temple. How's that sound, princess?"

"Great," Sam told him, though he had braced his elbows on the table and dropped his head into his hands.

"Great," Dean echoed. Then he turned to Castiel, his eyes angry. "You coming, Cas?"

Castiel had a sense that Dean was not just asking him to play darts. He so rarely understood the context or the stressors surrounding disagreements of this kind between the Winchesters, and he was never pleased to be asked to choose sides, because he had learned that humans tended to read into every choice a larger subtext that it was not his intention to convey. But his priorities were not complicated here, particularly when Sam turned his face away to stare at the exit.

"No," Castiel told him.

Dean gave a short, irritated nod. "Fantastic. Well, you can stay here and play Dear Abby, then. I hope Samantha gets it all out of her system." Then the older hunter spun and walked away, shaking his head as he disappeared into the tangle of patrons waiting by the bar counter. Castiel barely watched him go.

For a short while, the angel held his silence; he had expected that once Dean's footsteps vanished under the beat of the overhead music, Sam would lift his head, or possibly turn back to Castiel with one of his convoluted smiles—the smiles Castiel didn't like as well, because they always seemed to contain an element of pain or self-deprecation. But when two minutes passed without a movement from Sam, aside from the continual massage of his fingertips against his temples, Castiel decided the initiative would have to be his. He studied Sam's face for a long moment, the hitch of tension between his eyebrows and the thin line of his lips pressed together. Then he lifted one hand from the scarred surface of the table.

Sam's explanation of personal space had been severely confusing. Castiel didn't intend to reveal this to his companion, but the conversation had left him with a very unclear understanding of how far to stand from most people, except that eight inches was probably better than four—but he had understood at least that he was welcome to be close to Sam, so he didn't hesitate in reaching up to place a hand against Sam's shoulder. He didn't expect the young man to jump at his touch.

"Sam," Castiel said softly, in case his presence had been forgotten.

Sam laughed a little under his breath, the sound barely more than breathing out through his teeth as he turned back to face the table. "Hey, Cas. Sorry about that." He jerked his chin in the direction Dean had taken, but then winced, as if regretting the jarring action. "We're just… it'll be fine in a minute, so… you don't have to hang out here with me. You can go watch Dean if you want to."

"I do not," Castiel told him simply. He lifted his hand from Sam's shoulder and was surprised when he flinched again, as if the loss of contact had been as unexpected as the contact itself.

He was distracted from the puzzling reaction by a crash from the bar—glass breaking as a pair of beer tumblers slipped from careless hands and hit the floor—and by the way Sam grimaced at the discordant sound, one hand pressing harder against his forehead. All at once his complex actions became transparent, the fractured gestures and halting expressions aligning with something in the angel's memory, and Castiel frowned, leaning forward so that he could catch Sam's half-lidded gaze.

"Sam," the angel said, frowning slightly as those hazel eyes rose to meet his. "Do you have a headache?"

Sam pulled his head up from his hands at the question, sitting up straighter in his chair. "It's nothing. I'm fine, Cas—really." But Castiel was familiar enough by now with lies of omission that he didn't believe him, especially a moment later when the crunch of glass being swept into a long-handled dustpan caused Sam to squeeze his eyes shut.

Castiel tipped his head, his lips pressed into a thin line. He had seen this before with Sam—this automatic inclination to hide pain or weakness—and he doubted he'd ever truly understand it. He imagined that, like so many things in Sam's nature, the impulse had something to do with Dean. But he didn't have to understand it to fix it, not with something like this—so Castiel lifted his hand again and pressed two soft fingertips to Sam's temple, and then reached out with his grace, feeling the blood pounding in Sam's head for the briefest of moments. Sam took a sharp breath and leaned into his touch, his eyes slipping closed as Castiel's grace soothed his heavy pulse and the ache receded—then he let out a slow exhale, and when his eyes opened again Castiel could see that they were much brighter than they had been, the way they looked sometimes when Sam had had a full night's sleep and a cup of strong coffee, and was looking at him with an expression Castiel could not fully decipher. Sam gave a quiet laugh.

"Wow, that's… that's so much better. How did you…?" He ended the inquiry halfway with a shake of his head, no longer taking every movement gingerly. "Thanks, Cas," Sam started again, leaning back in his chair as his shoulders relaxed. "It was just the music, you know, and the strobes in that last bar…it felt like they were flashing inside my skull. It wasn't that bad or anything, but I just…"

Castiel wondered whether to believe the last part or not; he had long learned that Sam was inclined to downplay his own discomfort, when he couldn't avoid mentioning it altogether. Either way he let it go with a simple nod. Then he turned his hand over and brushed a strand of Sam's hair down behind his ear, feeling a little catch in his pulse where it fluttered at the base of his jaw.

"You should tell me when you are in pain, Sam," Castiel told him, holding the young man's eyes as his arm fell back to his side. "I can't help you if I do not know."

Something flickered across Sam's expression—it was gone too quickly for Castiel to guess what it meant. But any reply Sam might have made was lost a moment later when a voice Castiel recognized without thought broke through the clatter of glasses and jumble of conversation.

"Hey, Sammy! Matter of life or death over here!" Castiel and Sam both turned to seek out the speaker. Dean was standing at the bar counter between two empty stools, one casual elbow braced against the well-polished wood. He raised his eyebrows. "Your Shirley Temple—cherry or vanilla or what?"

Sam winced as his brother's question drew the attention of a few other patrons to their table, and he cast his eyes upward, though Castiel doubted he was praying—but when he looked down again, glancing for a moment at the angel in the chair beside his, Sam's lips were quirked up at the corners, as if to say that he had found the patience to deal with his elder brother again. It was not altogether a bad smile.

"Cherry _and_ vanilla," the younger Winchester called back, rolling his eyes lightly for Castiel's benefit. The angel gave him a thin smile in return. Sam shrugged. "And two straws."

"I'm not paying to get you two syrup pumps!" Dean told him. "You can live with cherry."

"Jerk," Sam called back, though even Castiel could tell the word was fond.

There were a great many things Castiel did not understand about the Winchesters. Moments like these were among them—moments when an argument would end without a conversation or an apology, with an action that almost seemed like it should start another argument but was inexplicably a compromise instead. Castiel doubted he would ever understand those things. But when Dean returned with a cherry-vanilla Shirley Temple and three straws and kicked the angel's foot instead of Sam's as he slumped back into his seat, Castiel considered that perhaps he had somehow become part of this strange balance that existed between them—and as Sam squeezed his hand under the table, he couldn't deny that it was something worth being a part of.

.x.

What would come to be known as the Wax Incident was completely the fault of Sam's older brother being a total moron.

Dean didn't believe in calling it a night, not in Las Vegas. The most Sam could ever wheedle out of him was taking a short break at their hotel, and even that never lasted long.

"Okay, kids," Dean announced as he pushed his way into the hotel room, his half-drunk stumble shoving the door back into the wall. Sam winced at the bang. "Sammy's feet hurt, so we're taking a breather, but we're T minus 59 minutes from hitting those elevators again. I didn't come to Vegas to sit around watching bad TV." Dean ducked into the bathroom, then leaned back out the door, pointing one finger at his brother. "You got that, Sam?"

Sam looked up from pulling off his shoes to give Dean a flat look. "Got it. You hate hotel cable."

"Cute," Dean replied, making a face at him that was pretty embarrassing on a man who was nearly thirty. Then the bathroom door slammed between them, and Sam rolled his eyes, moving farther into the room so that Castiel could get inside, too. The angel closed the door behind him and watched Sam untie his shoes with great interest.

"Are you preparing to retire, Sam?" Castiel wanted to know.

Sam did what he could to hold in his sigh. "Not really, Cas. We're just taking a break to recharge."

Castiel's lips twitched into a frown. "Is this because your cellular phones are out of battery?" he asked, enunciating each of the unfamiliar words carefully. He looked mildly concerned, which didn't really surprise Sam—Castiel had seen him upset once when his phone died suddenly on a hunt, and seemed to be carrying that memory with him. Sam grimaced at his own bad word choice and worked his heel out of his right shoe.

"We're just going to relax for an hour. Then we'll go out again, okay?" Castiel's eyes narrowed, but he nodded slightly.

Sam ditched his tennis shoes in the closet and then moved farther in, taking a quick glance around the room. There were the ubiquitous two queens, covered in thick red and gray coverlets this time, which was a step up from the puke-green modern art-style comforters at their last hotel. The room faced south down the Strip, and out the floor-to-ceiling window Sam could see the glowing Eiffel Tower of the Paris Hotel and the golden brick of the Mirage, surrounded on all sides by thousands of sparkling lights. They were too far north to see the fountains at the Bellagio, though. Sam bit down another sigh and let himself fall back onto the bed by the window. He always took this side of the room in Vegas—Dean got stupid drunk here, and the only thing worse than waking up because Dean and some girl were stumbling into the shared hotel room was waking up because Dean and some girl were stumbling into Sam's bed. It was best to be as far from the door as possible.

Sam shook his thoughts away, then looked up to find that Castiel had followed him across the room and was standing at the foot of the bed, studying his sprawl. His contemplative gaze made Sam a little self-conscious, and he straightened his limbs, inching up until his head was resting on the pillows.

"Do you need something, Cas?" he tried.

Castiel considered his crossed ankles for a moment longer before he looked up to meet Sam's eyes. "Is this our bed, Sam?" the angel asked.

Sam blinked, faltering in his answer. "Oh, um…"

Sam hadn't really considered yet whether he and Cas actually would be sharing a bed—he had utterly dismissed Dean's joke in the car, because his brother was a royal jasshonkey when he thought he was being funny. But the way Castiel was staring at the bed, like he was trying to figure out where to park, made Sam's stomach feel funny in a really good way. He tried not to think too hard about the possibility of lying next to Cas on the scratchy comforter, staring into those depthless blue eyes with the starchy pillows spread out under their heads…Sam cleared his throat to get his brain back on track and pulled his body in, leaving half of the bed open.

"Um… yeah, Cas, I guess it is." He propped himself up on one elbow, shifting as close to the edge of the bed as he could. "Did you want to lie down?" he asked. "It's…pretty soft, for a hotel."

Castiel shifted in front of the window. "I thought I'd just stand here," the angel told him plainly.

Sam wasn't quite sure what to say to that, but Dean stepped back into the room in time to catch Castiel's answer, and his brother pulled a demented face.

"Dude, no," Dean said, throwing himself down on the other bed and making the box springs creak. Castiel turned to look at him, and Dean held up his hands in an X, like he was calling a bad field goal or something. "No creepy angel voyeurs tonight. If you want to stand around, go stand on the roof or something." Dean rolled himself up to sit against the headboard, and then seized the TV remote, flicking the screen on with a flourish. "In fact, definitely do that—get out of here for a while. I could use a break from you anyway."

"Dean—" Sam started. But before he could protest in full, there was a rustle of invisible wings and the space at the foot of his bed was suddenly empty; Sam blinked at the spot and wondered, with an exit that quick, if Castiel wanted a break from them, too. Still he made a point of turning over and giving his brother a dirty look—only maybe twenty-five percent of which came from the fact that he'd been robbed.

Dean sent him a look right back. "What? There is something wrong with that guy, Sam—you can't deny that."

Sam rolled his eyes. "He's just Cas, Dean."

Dean grunted. "Well, he can be _just Cas_ somewhere else for a while. Plus I thought you wanted a nap. Tell me you were gonna get your beauty sleep with him staring a hole in your forehead."

Sam just rolled his eyes and got up to brush his teeth, burying his comebacks about beauty and angels who were welcome to watch him sleep in a mouthful of complimentary toothpaste.

It wasn't until Sam finished rinsing his mouth that he noticed two thin packets resting next to the sink. The plastic packaging was red and gray, in the same pattern as the coverlets; Sam wiped his mouth on the back of his hand and picked one of them up, finding _For your convenience_ printed in white letters on the other side. He stared at it for a moment, trying to imagine what would be long and thin enough to fit inside. Then he realized what it was, and his expression soured; he opened the bathroom door and stepped out to glare at his brother, whose glazed eyes were fixed on the TV.

"Seriously, Dean, what the hell? Where did you even get these?" Sam asked, waving the packet in one hand.

Grudgingly, Dean tore himself away from the TV, frowning when he saw what his brother was holding. "Man, I don't even know what that is. It was just by the sink. Isn't it just, like, some soap or something?"

Sam narrowed his eyes, trying to decide if Dean was messing with him. His brother honestly looked baffled, though, so he let it go, his hand slipping back to his side as he deflated. "No, it's not soap. It's a cold waxing strip."

"A cold what?" Dean asked, jerking around to stare at Sam like he'd grown a second head.

"A waxing strip," Sam repeated, rolling his eyes up. "For waxing, like, your legs or whatever. But you just press them on instead of…" Then he realized that Dean's eyebrows had jumped up on his head, his brother's classic _the words coming out of your mouth are so priceless I can't even make fun of you right now_ expression, and Sam stopped his explanation abruptly, a frown creasing his lips. "Shut up."

Dean laughed and shook his head. "Hey, I'm not the one explaining in gory detail how he waxes his legs."

"I don't—" Sam caught himself on the edge of that endless argument, and took a measured breath, fixing his brother with a glare that was only about half irritated. "It's just that they don't give you this stuff unless you ask for it, so I thought you were messing with me." Dean sent him another gleefully incredulous look, and Sam willed himself to stop talking, so that at least the pit he was digging didn't get any deeper. "They must have just… delivered it to the wrong room."

Dean snorted. "Or you ordered it when you were talking to the key lady. No need to be shy, Sammy—if you called a Vegas break because you needed to come up here and wax your legs, I won't hold it against you. I get it—girls have needs."

Sam knew it was childish, but he threw the waxing packet at his brother anyway. "Just shut up," he said again, too tired to work for the retort. Then he made his way across the room and flopped back onto his bed, pretending he couldn't hear Dean sniggering at him.

Once his brother had lost interest in crinkling the wax packet mockingly in his direction (cellophane could absolutely convey things like mocking), and Sam had settled into the heavy comforter, he found himself relaxing easily. Sharing a hotel room in Vegas with Dean was a familiar feeling, and it didn't take long for Sam to sink into it, the night's tension easing from his shoulders. He drifted off to the muted bop and applause of women's tennis ("Couldn't find any beach volleyball," Dean defended) and the sound of his brother's soft breathing.

He woke up screaming when something ripped a chunk out of his leg.

A sudden, sizzling pain from his ankle up his calf jolted Sam out of unconsciousness; he surged up in bed gasping, wringing the blankets between his hands and kicking viciously at whatever demon or monster was attacking his feet. His heel collided solidly with something as Sam writhed up out of the comforter, pressing his back against the headboard and scrambling for a knife or a gun that wasn't under his pillow. Then his senses blearily came back to him, and he stared around the hotel room, hazel eyes wide in his face.

Nothing seemed to be out of place. The TV was still on, muttering softly. A figure was slowly picking himself up from the floor, and Sam realized suddenly that it was Dean he had kicked, knocking his older brother flat on his ass between their beds. Then Sam realized that his jeans were pulled up on his right leg, rolled almost to his knee, and the sight of bright red skin sent a wave of pain through him again—Sam hissed through his teeth and pulled his knee up his chest as Dean picked himself up from the floor, one hand braced on the mattress.

"Jesus, Sammy—you've got a hell of a donkey kick," Dean told him, rubbing his left shoulder with the heel of his hand. Sam ignored him. He was preoccupied by the terrible stinging that was throbbing up his leg in spirals from the rectangular patch of scarlet, angry skin blossoming on his calf.

"What the f… agh!" Sam bit out, putting a panicked finger to the red patch and regretting it instantly. "Shit, that burns! What is that?" Then he heard the telltale laughter, and he rounded on his brother, one hand cupped protectively over the raw skin. "What the fuck did you do, Dean?"

Dean wasn't just laughing anymore—he was braying like a true jackass. "Hey, you were right, Sammy—these are really easy to use," he said, his voice way too normal as he pulled himself back into a seat on the edge of the bed. Then he held up the red and gray plastic packet, and understanding exploded into Sam's mind.

"Dean, you didn't…" Sam looked down at his aching leg again, and he could see it now—under the raised welts, a whole swatch of skin on his calf was totally hairless, shiny with lingering wax and bright red with trauma. Somehow knowing what had happened made the pain worse. Sam's head slumped back against the wall and he squeezed his eyes shut. "Ah, shit… damn it, Dean, you're such a bastard."

Dean pulled a fake offended expression. "Hey, I was born in wedlock," his brother joked. But Sam was not in the mood.

"What kind of a deranged psychopath waxes somebody's leg while they're asleep?" Sam demanded, tears pricking the corners of his eyes as he rubbed his knee hard. He couldn't bear the thought of rubbing the wound itself. "Swear to God, Dean—I thought someone was eating me alive, starting with my ankle!"

Dean blinked at him, leaning forward on the bed. "Wait, are you crying?"

"Yeah—little bit," Sam shot back, though he swiped a hand against the corners of his eyes.

Dean rolled his eyes with a cackle. "Man, you are such a crybaby. Can't handle a little wax? This is not a big deal. Here—I'll show you how a real man takes it." Before Sam could warn him, Dean had slapped the other wax strip down on his forearm and was rubbing it vigorously onto his skin. He looked up at Sam with a cocky grin. "Ready? One, two—"

Dean gripped one end of the wax strip and yanked. Then his eyes rolled back in his head and he let out an unholy sound that reminded Sam of a demon being exorcised.

"Holy mother of—" Dean collapsed backward onto the bed, waving his arm frantically over his head. He had only pulled the wax strip off halfway, and it flapped above him like a white flag as Sam's brother kicked the pillows with thrashing feet. "Fuck me with a wrench!" Dean shouted at the top of his lungs. "What is this thing? It stings like a bitch!"

"Yeah—try waking up to that," Sam shot back. Then he rolled up from the headboard and grabbed his brother's flailing wrist, halting Dean's melodramatics. "Hold still—I have to get this strip off the rest of the way."

All of Dean's attention was suddenly focused on Sam; he kicked out, narrowly missing Sam's solar plexus. "The fuck you do," Dean told him, and if they hadn't been so busy fighting Sam would have taken a second to point out that Dean's eyes were tearing up, too. His older brother struggled up into a sitting position and tried to wrench his arm away from Sam. "I am not going through that again. That thing can stay on my arm for the rest of my life!"

Sam just held on tighter, sliding one hand up to cover the wax strip. "Dean, come on—hey, just listen to me for a sec, okay?" he said, catching his brother's eyes and waiting for his reasonable tone to pull Dean momentarily still. Then without warning Sam ripped the wax strip from his arm in the classic Band-Aid approach, and Dean lurched backward and overbalanced, tumbling onto the efficiency carpet with his legs lashing behind him.

"Goddamn it, Sammy—cruel and unusual, you hear me? You're a fucking demon!"

"You started it," Sam snapped, massaging his own patch of brutalized skin. That was as far as the fight went, though, because a moment later there was a rustle of wings and Castiel whirled into the room, his eyes wild as he whipped his head between the brothers.

"Sam, Dean—I heard you scream. Are you being attacked?" he demanded, scouring the room. Dean just groaned and rolled over at his feet. Castiel's gaze riveted to Sam, and then to the raw patch of skin on his calf; the angel frowned and appeared at his side in an instant, bracing one hand on the younger Winchester's knee as he took a closer look at the damage. "The hair has been ripped out of your leg," he observed, looking up at Sam with a furrowed forehead. "How did this happen?"

"Dean's a complete menace," Sam told him in a hiss, clenching his teeth as another throb of pain raced up his leg. "Can you fix it, Cas?"

Castiel narrowed his eyes. "I cannot restore the hair. But I can ease the pain."

"That's perfect," Sam gasped, and for a second he thought he might pass out as beautiful, cooling relief flooded through his leg. He was gratified to notice the angel took his time fixing the patch Dean had inflicted on himself.

When it was all over, and Dean had sulked back to his own bed with two painkillers ("For the emotional trauma," he griped) while Castiel watched them with uncomprehending eyes, Sam was interrupted from massaging his hairless calf by a pillow hitting his stomach. He shot Dean a scathing look that his brother ignored.

"Just wanted to let you know, Sammy," Dean began, nodding solemnly, "that this has been a learning experience for me."

Sam rolled his eyes. "Yeah?"

"Yeah," Dean echoed. "Those girls who get Brazilian waxes? Next time I bed one, I'm gonna give her a round of applause."

Sam made sure Dean got his pillow right in the face.

.x.

Dean's hot tub etiquette left a lot to be desired.

"Hey, Sammy." Sam looked up from where he was sitting on the hot tub bench to find Dean floating on his back in the middle of the water, his wet hair gelled into spikes. Dean grinned wickedly. "You're basically a fruitarian, right? Like Gandhi? Well, here—I got some prunes for ya!" His brother popped his feet suddenly out of the water and shoved his shriveled toes in Sam's face. Sam reeled back and pushed them away with a scowl.

"Dean—that's gross, man, knock it off." Dean just snickered, kicking a splash of hot water at his brother. Sam rolled his eyes as he wiped it from his cheek. "What are you, five?"

"On a scale from one to ten, I'm more like an eleven," Dean told him, never passing up a chance to flash that cheeky smile. "Not to brag."

Sam threw a _kill me now_ look up at the starless sky.

They'd found the five in-ground hot tubs tucked away in one corner of the enormous pool complex, which was mostly deserted. Sam was glad of that, since this wasn't actually their hotel—one look at the party hot tub where they were staying had been enough to convince the younger Winchester that angelically hopping the fence to some other hotel's pool was justifiable here, since there was no way the other twenty-five people in the party tub would understand why a thirty-something man in a trench coat was watching them all soak.

Dean had said he remembered a more private place, with a lift of his eyebrows that got Sam to change the subject ASAP. To his brother's credit, though, the tip had panned out—they had a hot tub all to themselves, and the only other people in the huge courtyard, three women sharing another hot tub at the far end of the line, didn't seem to be paying any attention to the angel perched next to Sam on the rim of the hot tub. Sam had coaxed Castiel into taking off his shoes and rolling his pants up far enough that he could put his feet in the water, his bare toes reminding Sam of walking side by side on the beach in the summer. The angel was sitting now, perched on the concrete edge of the hot tub with his coat flaring out behind him, both arms braced stoically across his knees. Sam was happy just to have the angel with them, and in such a personal way, but as usual Dean wasn't nearly satisfied.

His brother wheeled his arms back through the extra-large hot tub and kicked some water at his guardian angel, putting a sharp frown on Castiel's face even though he missed.

"Cas, have I told you lately how depressingly uptight you are?" Dean wrinkled his nose, gesturing vaguely in the angel's direction. "Seriously—the dress code here is swim trunks and six packs, and you're sitting there in what—the accountant three-piece special? Every time I look at you, I think I'm looking at a streaker, or a serial killer maybe. Would you lose the coat, at least?" Castiel glanced down at himself and then back at Dean—but Sam could see that was the most Dean was going to get out of him, and his brother seemed to know it, too, if the way he flopped back into the water was any indication. Dean gave a theatrical groan. "Honestly. Were you born with that stick up your ass, or did it come with the suit?"

Castiel cocked his head to one side, eyes narrowed, the way he always did when Dean's poetic license got the best of him; Sam just sighed and straightened against the tiled wall of the hot tub, leaning back to rest one elbow on the rim next to Castiel's knee.

"Dean, give it a rest, all right? It's fine," he said, catching his brother's eye and nodding once in their code for _being drunk is making you act like a douchebag._ At least, it was Sam's code for that—he wasn't sure Dean had ever figured out what it meant.

"No, Sam, it's not fine," Dean told him, slouching back across the hot tub until he was seated opposite his brother. Sam winced a little at the volume. Dean had managed to put down a beer and a half in the time between getting on the elevator to come down from their waxing ordeal and entering the alcohol-free zone that was the pool courtyard, and that had basically undone any sobering up that had happened against his will during their hour-long hiatus. So he was being his obnoxiously loud self again. Sam just counted his blessings that Dean wasn't really loud enough to bother the women in the other hot tub yet.

Yet.

"You guys don't get it," Dean was saying, squinting at them through narrowed eyes. Sam didn't know if he was that mad of if he just couldn't get his eyes to focus. "This is Vegas. _Las Vegas_. And here we are. We've got Cas, who—speaking as a totally straight guy who's never thought about it—is good-looking enough that Catwoman wanted to wrangle him off, but he's sitting in a hot tub with a trench coat on. How does that not scream mental patient?" Dean turned blearily in Sam's direction. "And then there's my little brother, who—even though a whole table of gorgeous women mistook him for a male stripper and probably would have paid for a dance…" Sam sent Dean a look, but his brother just held up a hand. "Would you just listen instead of bitching at me for a minute, Sam? You could have slept with at least four of those ladies if you'd seized the day on that one, but instead, you're babysitting said mental patient and drinking about as much as an eighty-year-old woman at Easter brunch. I know I got the looks in the family, Sammy, but come on—at least try."

Dean was getting into his tirade now; Sam glanced up at Castiel to find the angel looking down at him, and then rolled his eyes, making a half-hearted attempt to break into the one-man diatribe. "Dean—"

"I mean, if there was anywhere on Earth where a nerdy angel and Bigfoot had even a _prayer_ of finding love," Dean went on, steamrolling right over him, "it would be Las Vegas. But so far, I think the score stands at Dean making it to first base five times and you two dancing with each other in the corner of some bar. Most awkward two-step ever, by the way."

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose as his head slumped forward, wondering how Dean never got tired of himself. "We weren't dancing," he said again, but there was no force behind the words.

Dean waved him off with one extravagant hand. "I call it like I see it."

Next to Sam, Castiel shifted on the edge of the hot tub, holding the rolls of his pant legs away from the water. "Are you trying to say something?" the angel asked, giving Sam's brother a quizzical stare. Sam was pretty sure it was a genuine question, as in Cas had lost Dean somewhere in between the slang and the sexual metaphors—but Dean took it as sarcasm, if the scowl that came over his face proved anything.

"Yes, I'm saying something, you blunt tool." Dean paused for a second, as if trying to remember where he'd been headed—then the hot tub at the far end of the line caught his eye, and he swung an arm in that direction, nearly bashing his elbow on the tiled rim. "There's three foxy women in that hot tub. And there's three of us. We should go down there en masse, turn on the charm, and make that happen."

Sam craned his neck around to get a better look at the distant hot tub. Now that he was paying attention, it looked more like a family than a group of friends—one of the girls was in Dean's strike zone, maybe, but another was way too young, probably not even out of high school. Sam thought the third woman might be their mother. He turned back to his brother with a pained smile on his face.

"Yeah… you know, Dean, I'm fine here."

Dean shook his head slowly, like a disappointed Little League coach. "Really, Sammy? You're ditching me again on this one?" Sam shrugged. Dean let his hands flop into the water as his gaze veered over to Castiel. "Well, I won't even bother asking our wingman, since you two are like the Bobbsey twins tonight…" Dean sat still a moment longer, like he was waiting for one of them to change their minds and vote to go along; then the older Winchester pushed himself up onto the rim of the hot tub and swung himself out, ruffling one careless hand through his hair as he got to his feet. "Fine. I'll do it myself. But if I score with all three, I don't want to hear about it from any sore losers." Then he was off across the concrete courtyard, his confident strut only slightly impaired by how often he had to correct his course.

Sam waited in the stilling water for a few seconds, watching his brother's retreating back. Once Dean was out of earshot, he turned his face up to meet Castiel's eyes, and he let himself laugh a little, noticing how the sound brought out a curve at the corners of the angel's lips.

"I'm just not going to watch how that goes down," Sam said softly, tilting his head in Dean's direction.

In spite of himself, though, he couldn't help following his brother's progress until he saw Dean slip into the far-off hot tub, apparently talking his way past the first firewall, at least. Sam turned back to find that Castiel was studying him in silence, and there was a note of thoughtfulness to the angel's expression, like he was turning something over in his mind. Sam wasn't positive how he knew that. Still, he had an idea what it might be about, and he leaned back against the wall of the hot tub, his shrug sending little ripples across the boiling water.

"You know you don't have to listen to any of the stuff Dean says, right, Cas?"

Castiel's lips twitched into the barest hint of a smile. "Most of the things Dean says when he is intoxicated are clearly nonsense," he replied evenly. Something about his answer stuck in Sam's mind, though, and he tilted his head back to get a better look at Castiel's expression, blinking up into stark blue eyes.

"Most?" Sam repeated.

Castiel looked down at the water. He studied it like he was looking for his reflection, though the surface was much too unstable for that. After a moment, his gaze moved to Sam's face, quiet but curious. "There's no need to change your plans to accommodate me, Sam," Castiel told him simply, glancing across the concrete toward the other hot tub. "If you would prefer to look for love." And Sam found himself blinking, because there was something about the way that Castiel had said the last, something fraught and significant.

Sam followed his gaze to the four figures across the way, submerged up to their shoulders. Dean was telling a joke, he could tell by the cock of his brother's head—he couldn't tell if anyone else thought it was funny. Then he looked back up at Castiel, sitting on the edge of the hot tub with his pants rolled up. For some reason the contrast between the two made him smile with an achingly fond twinge in his chest. Sam stretched and fell back to brace his elbows on the concrete rim of the tub, damp strands of his hair tickling the back of his neck. He looked straight up into the dazzling blue eyes that all the stars in the night sky didn't have a chance of outshining.

"I don't need to go looking for love, Cas," Sam answered honestly—honest, because there was nowhere else for Sam to go. He'd found love and was lucky enough to be looking right at it. "I'd rather just stay here with you," Sam finished with a small smile that he wasn't sure he'd ever shown the angel before—happy because stolen moments like this with Castiel were by far the most precious to him, and wistful because he could confess secretly to Cas a thousand times, give him a thousand blissful smiles, wish a thousand times on every star, but the angel would still be the same distance away.

Castiel didn't say anything for a moment. But his shoulders relaxed under his trench coat, and somehow he seemed more settled to Sam, less likely to disappear from the edge of the hot tub in a brush of wings. He was also smiling slightly. Sam returned the expression. Then he slumped against the tiled wall, and let himself relax as well, watching steam rise from the surface of the water into the warm Nevada air.

They were both content to be quiet for a while, and Sam found his mind going quiet, too, as he closed his eyes and just soaked it all up, the nearness of the angel, the heat of the jets and the faraway buzz of voices and music beyond the hotel walls. Eventually he realized that his head had tipped in Castiel's direction, his temple just resting against the curve of the angel's arm—he thought about sitting up, but the warmth made him sluggish, and Castiel was still, so he left it there, lost in his thoughts. He wasn't sure how many minutes actually passed before he felt Castiel's coat shift against his face.

"Are you falling asleep, Sam?"

Sam breathed in and pulled himself halfway up so that he could look up and meet those eyes that were unusually soft right at that moment. "Mm. Just drifting a little," he said, his shoulders rolling in a lethargic shrug. Then he lifted his eyebrows, nodding gently in the direction of the water. "You sure you don't want to come in, Cas?"

Castiel pressed his lips together. "No," he said, the fingers of one hand curling into his sleeve.

Sam sent the angel his most open smile. "You don't have to. But if you ever do want to relax a little bit…" Sam stretched one bare arm out along the concrete, and then slid down until he felt the warm water on the back of his neck, his hair floating softly on the ripples. "I'd love it if you'd join me."

Castiel looked down at the hot tub again, his blue eyes unreadable.

By the time Dean returned from his doomed fishing expedition, Castiel had removed both jackets and his tie and had rolled his shirtsleeves up to his elbows, his hands and feet trailing in the water.

"Oh, I see how it is," Dean declared, sliding back into the hot tub with a small tidal wave. "So you'll strip for Sam, but not for me, huh?"

Sam felt he was totally justified splashing his brother in the face.


	5. Darkness

**Looking for Love in Las Vegas**

**Part V: Darkness**

Castiel suspected Sam might be drunk.

It was more difficult to tell with Sam than with his brother; Castiel had seen Dean intoxicated many times, and he was familiar with the signs by now, from his increase in volume to how desperate he became to find equally intoxicated women. But he couldn't remember ever seeing Sam drunk before.

They had returned to the first bar of the evening, the same round booth and a similar bowl of peanuts, though Sam was sitting between Castiel and Dean this time. Dean had been complaining most of the evening about his younger brother's reluctance to drink—but something had relaxed in Sam since they left the pool area, and he was following Dean's lead now, drinking without reservation. He had even taken it upon himself to retrieve each round of beers from the bar, which Castiel only found strange because Sam had to ask him to stand up every time he wanted to get out of the booth. Castiel wasn't sure what had changed, but he wondered if he was somehow responsible. In between tolerating very unlikely stories from Dean and scrutinizing the passing clientele for any more women who might be preparing to make unfounded accusations, he had caught Sam sending him secret smiles around the mouth of his bottle, and it wasn't long until the angel found that he was watching Sam more than the crowd, distracted by the enigma in that smile.

In spite of the constant shuffling in and out of the booth, Castiel had decided he didn't mind a drunken Sam very much. While Dean was abrasive in his alcoholic haze, even when he intended to be humorous, Sam just seemed to laugh a lot more when he was drunk. He was much more lax with Dean as well, which Castiel thought might be the primary reason for the older hunter's improved mood—Dean was grinning fiercely, and had one hand anchored on Sam's shoulder in spite of the half-argument the two were engaged in.

"Beer penny is not a rigged game," Dean insisted, gesturing with his beer bottle as if it were a mace.

Sam laughed and shook his head, leaning back into the cushioned walls of the booth. "It's not a game at all, Dean. It's something you and Bobby made up when you'd had, like, a full fifth of scotch and enough beers to start a bowling alley with the empty bottles."

"That doesn't mean it's not a game," Dean argued. He set his beer down to rummage in his pocket for a moment, then produced a gleaming one-cent coin, which he flicked back and forth between his thumb and forefinger. "People make up new drinking games all the time—especially when they're drunk. You just don't like it because you suck at it."

Earlier in the evening, Castiel thought a comment like that might have drawn a roll of Sam's eyes—but the younger Winchester was in another mood now, and he just laughed again, slumping to the right until his shoulder brushed Castiel's. "Everyone sucks at it, Dean. It's not physically possible to flick a penny off your thumb and get it down the hole of a beer bottle."

"Bobby did it twice," Dean told him.

This time Sam did roll his eyes. "Allegedly. But only you two were there to see it, and you were both cooked before you even started playing."

Sam twisted his head to look at Castiel, as if searching for support—the angel hadn't had any success following the conversation, though, so he simply returned the look, considering the way the reflection of the overhead lights shone in Sam's contented eyes. Dean blew out through his lips and reached around the table to shake his brother's shoulder. "Fine. There's only one way to settle this," he declared, balancing the penny on his thumbnail. Castiel thought it was a very adept motion, considering the older hunter was having trouble keeping both eyes focused on the same target. Dean glanced up at his brother with a grin curling the corners of his mouth. "Do the honors, Sammy?"

Castiel was sure, now, that Sam was drunk, or at least very close—it was the only explanation for the accommodating smile on Sam's face as he shrugged out of Dean's hold and slid around the booth until he was sitting flush against Castiel, facing his brother across the table and dragging Dean's beer bottle over to their side. His shoulder nudged Castiel's as he positioned the bottle along the edge between the angel and himself. "All right," Sam agreed, his eyes a little softer and lower-lidded than Castiel was used to seeing them. Perhaps that was an effect of the alcohol, too. "Give it your best shot. Cas and I will be the judges."

Dean looked annoyed. "Cas doesn't know the first thing about drinking games. Just leave him out of this—this is between you and me, Sammy."

Castiel's eyes narrowed. Dean's mood had been erratic since they'd returned to this bar, oscillating between good humor and irritation seemingly without cause. Castiel had begun to wonder if this had something to do with him as well.

Sam was unfazed. "Would you just take your shot?" he said, pointing at the bottle. Then Sam paused. "Unless you're stalling, because you know you can't do it and you're going to look like an idiot."

Dean bent low to the table to line up his shot. "Prepare to be amazed, nonbeliever." Castiel leaned away from the bottle.

The alcohol had inhibited Sam's reflexes. That was the conclusion Castiel came to a moment later, after the penny leapt up from Dean's thumb. It hit the neck of the bottle and bounced off, and Sam made a grab for it. Castiel had seen both Winchesters execute much more difficult feats time after time, but Sam's coordination was not at its best, and he missed catching the penny, which glanced off of his knuckles and disappeared. Then Sam's palm followed its inevitable arc of motion into the neck of Dean's beer, and toppled the bottle over. It hit the edge of the table and stopped, but the beer did not, and Castiel snapped back against the wall of the booth as the spray of golden liquor burst into foam against his chest.

For a moment, Castiel didn't say anything. He just stared down at the alcohol soaking into his trench coat and button-down, blinking against the sublimating fumes.

"Oh, God," Sam stammered, his hands fumbling to get the bottle upright again and stop the amber spew. He snatched the beer bottle up and set it down in front of Dean, and then stared at the splatter stain on Castiel with wide, uncomprehending eyes. "Oh, Cas, I'm so sorry," Sam stuttered, pushing his hands back through his hair and leaving streaks of beer foaming amid the dark strands. "God, I'm such an idiot. Um—just hang on a second—don't disappear, okay? I think I have—"

"Damn it, Sam, that was my beer," Dean grumbled, lifting the mostly empty bottle to gauge how much was left in the bottom. "You're getting me another one," he vowed, and then shook the bottle—but Sam did not seem to be paying any attention to him, digging through every one of his jacket pockets and unloading their wallets and cell phones onto a dry patch of the table. At last the younger Winchester straightened with a handful of napkins and turned back to Castiel.

"Here we go. Just give me a second, okay?" Sam bent toward him and pressed his clump of napkins to the damp patch on his shirt, soaking up what he could of the beer. "Shit, I hope this doesn't stain." He began rubbing the wad of napkins vigorously against Castiel's coat, hard enough to leave little particles of wet napkin behind; the angel decided it wasn't a very pleasant feeling.

Castiel looked down at the blot on his jacket—and because he didn't want it there, a moment later it was not, the layers of his clothing as dry and clean as they had been when he'd first appeared in the Impala that morning on Interstate 15, surrounded by the Great Salt Lake Desert. Sam didn't seem to notice.

"I am so, so sorry, Cas," Sam was saying, holding his bottom lip between his teeth. He glanced up at the angel and then down again just as quickly, resolutely wiping long, useless lines down Castiel's shirt. "I wasn't thinking about your shirt—I mean I wasn't thinking about the bottle—"

"Sam, stop it!" Dean snapped, slamming his mostly empty bottle down on the table. "Look at him! He's dry already."

Sam stopped moving abruptly, his hand frozen on the lapel of the trench coat as he blinked at the angel's clothes. It wasn't until those hazel eyes lifted to his that Castiel realized he should have said something when he nullified the stain. He expected to see uncertainty or embarrassment on Sam's expressive face—but the alcohol and the dry trench coat and the beer-soaked napkins together seemed to be too much for him, and all at once Sam was laughing, the sound bursting out of him as if it were out of his control. He buckled in the grip of his laughter and slid down to press his face into Castiel's shoulder, the nest of napkins crinkling in his shaking hand.

"Oh, Cas, I…"

But Castiel didn't get to know what Sam was—Sam's body was shaking too hard to speak, and though the aerial angle was strange Castiel could not pull his gaze away from Sam's face as the young man closed his eyes and tucked his chin, the throb of his stuttered exhale resonating in the angel's chest. It was not loud, Sam's laughter, but nonetheless it seemed to take all of him, a light, surprised sound that caught in his throat like he was gasping for breath. It occurred to Castiel suddenly that he had never heard Sam laugh this way before—with his whole self, the sound flowing out against his will, getting the better of him. He vowed not to let this be the last time.

On the other side of the table, Dean rolled his eyes. "Get a grip, Sammy—angel dry cleaning's not that funny." The older Winchester's comment just seemed to make Sam laugh harder, and Dean pressed his lips into a frown. "Sam, come on—this is embarrassing. You sound like a teenage girl." He reached out and grabbed his brother's shoulder, urging him back toward the other side of the booth. For a moment Castiel was struck by the symmetry of their positions—Sam gripping his shoulder, Dean gripping Sam's, some struggle he did not understand taking place in that brief moment. Then Dean let go and slouched back in his seat. "Damn it. He's in the giggle phase."

Castiel turned away from Sam to meet Dean's gaze. "What does that mean?" he asked.

Dean rolled his eyes again. "It means he's hit about a six on the Sammy drunk scale. And there's no snapping him out of it." Dean stood up from the booth and waved one dismissive hand at his brother. "Just let him laugh himself out. Never lasts long. I need another beer anyway, and Sam could use a fresh one."

Castiel glanced at the young man beside him, the vibrations of his laughter traveling up his arm and buzzing under Castiel's skin, and then looked up at Dean, his eyes narrowed in consideration. "Perhaps he does not need another round."

Dean glared back at him, jaw set. "Hey, you know what, Cas? You want to be bored and sober all night, that's your business. But Sammy and me are finally having a good time, and we're just getting started." He stared at the angel for a moment, then slid his beer bottle across the table and stopped it right in front of Castiel, in the small puddle of castoff Sam hadn't bothered to wipe up. The inch of liquid remaining rocked in the bottom. "Here. I'll leave this with you," Dean said. But he kept his hand over the mouth of the bottle a moment longer, catching Castiel's eyes. "Don't forget you're just holding it for me."

Castiel watched Dean leave and wondered if he'd been talking about the beer.

By the time the older Winchester disappeared into the crowd, Sam's form was no longer shaking with laughter, though he was still leaning against the angel, the warm line of his body proof of how close they were. Castiel looked down to find Sam quietly studying his face; his eyes were still partially closed, but there was a softer element to his expression, the laugh lines fading already around his mouth. Castiel's eyebrows drew together.

"Sam?" he asked gently.

Sam gave another small laugh—this one was more familiar, though, just teasing the end of a sigh. It seemed very different from the torrent of laughter a minute before. "I was just thinking," Sam told him. Castiel nodded, the way Sam always did when he wished the angel to go on. Sam rolled his head to rest more comfortably against his collarbone, one of those smiles Castiel couldn't read touching his lips. "About you, you know—and us, and everything."

"What were you thinking about me?" Castiel wished to know.

Sam stared at the tan fabric of his coat as if he were deciphering the cross-woven strands. He seemed to realize at the same time as Castiel that the damp napkins were still clutched in his fist—Sam sat up far enough to deposit them into the beer spill on the table, and Castiel erased the last of the alcohol from his trench coat. Sam watched the stain vanish and laughed under his breath.

"Just that, you know… you're… I mean, you're an angel, Cas."

Castiel stared back into Sam's puzzling hazel eyes. "Yes," he affirmed.

Sam shook his head. "And you're here, hanging out with us and… and getting drenched in beer."

Castiel glanced down at himself, and then back up at Sam, a wrinkle of uncertainty bothering his forehead. "It is gone now," he told his companion slowly, in case Sam had any doubts.

Sam's chin drooped toward his chest, a smile flitting over his lips. "Yeah. Yeah it is, Cas. And that's amazing. You're amazing. And you could be anywhere, but you're here." Sam was quiet for a moment, and then he looked at Castiel and lifted his hand to the angel's shoulder, brushing his fingers down the tan seam in a soft way that Castiel somehow felt as far down as his borrowed bones. "We don't tell you enough how much you mean to us, Cas. But you're…you're one of a kind. You mean so much to me. And to Dean. Both of us. And I just… I want you to know that."

Castiel studied Sam for a moment in silence, memorizing without thought every contour of his face, the gentle curve of his dimples and the slow nodding of his head, and the tip of his index finger straying across his trench coat, inscribing idle circles into the rough fabric. At last his lips twitched. "You are drunk, Sam," Castiel told him simply, reaching up to cover the warm hand with one of his own. Sam laughed and squeezed his shoulder, and leaned a little closer.

"Just tipsy," Sam assured him, with the authority of one who had spent a great deal of time walking that line.

Castiel shook his head once. "No. You are drunk."

Sam looked back at Castiel without saying anything. The angel was surprised by how clear his eyes still seemed—the sheen of distance and misjudgment that always settled into Dean's eyes eventually was nowhere in Sam's. Then the younger Winchester let his hand slip out from under Castiel's, and reached down to reclaim his beer bottle, which the angel had almost forgotten. Sam smiled as he put it to his lips.

"Maybe a little, I guess," he said, taking a small sip. "I'll be fine in half an hour. But it's okay to be like this sometimes, right?"

Castiel did not know what being _like this_ meant. It was not simply being drunk—he had witnessed Dean often enough to know that. There was something special about being _like this_ —alone in a booth with Sam listing against his shoulder, trusting Castiel with so much of himself, his eyes fluttering briefly closed as he tipped his bottle back and swallowed. Castiel said nothing for a long moment before he turned his attention to something else, tipping his head slightly to one side.

"I did not think you liked beer," he said, eyeing the brown glass bottle.

The dimples had returned to Sam's cheeks. Castiel decided he preferred that smile to most of the others. Sam swallowed and then set his bottle gently down on the table, and leaned over to whisper in Castiel's ear, cupping his hand around his mouth.

"I paid the bartender to put a Toblerone cocktail in this empty bottle instead of beer. It's basically a chocolate milkshake with alcohol in it." Sam laughed against the shell of his ear, the soft feather of his breath tickling the angel's eardrum. "Dean says only girls drink Kahlua, but he's not going to notice. So don't say anything?"

Castiel had only colloquial knowledge of a chocolate milkshake. He had no way of knowing what Kahlua was. But he did know that this felt like a secret, and that was a good feeling, and he had no desire to tell Dean anything.

.x.

Dean was pissed.

He was drunk, too, finally. Which had taken too damn long. And it all should have been looking up now. But there was a great big pothole in Dean's road to an outstanding night in Vegas, and its name was Castiel.

Dean liked Vegas. He liked being in Vegas with Sam. He loved being in Vegas with drunk Sam, because drunk Sam was a riot—he was happy, he was gullible, and he was one of those "yeah, okay" drunks, which meant Dean pretty much got whatever he wanted as soon as his little brother was the right amount of sloshed. Dean liked getting whatever he wanted. It wasn't like he was selfish. It was just that Dean wanted awesome things, and anyone who got to tag along with what Dean wanted was fucking blessed.

Sam _had been_ getting drunk. But he was sober as a mother superior now, and about twice as cranky. He hadn't touched a drop since the last bar, when Castiel got drenched in Dean's beer like some really lame parody of a wet t-shirt contest. That wasn't Dean's fault, though, and he didn't see why he should be punished for it. And anyway, Cas was supposed to be an angel. A weird, nerdy, undersocialized angel with personal space issues and no sense of humor, but an angel all the same. If an angel didn't want to get a shirt full of beer, he didn't. End of story.

Sam gave him the bitchface when he said that.

Dean slumped back against the bar of whatever club they were in and glanced down the line of stools, looking for his brother and the douchebag in a trench coat. They were standing in a huddle maybe ten feet away, their backs to the dance floor—and that pissed Dean off, too, because if Sam was as smashed as he should have been by whatever time it was now, he'd have been out on that floor, swinging his limbs like a six-foot-four scarecrow with ants in his pants. Or else he'd have been leaning on the bar next to Dean, whining about how he hated to dance. Whatever. But he wouldn't have just stood around being all buddy-buddy with a fucking angel of the Lord, anyway.

Who was surprised it wasn't much fun to do Sin City with an angel of the Lord.

Dean knocked back a shot of something he'd probably ordered and maybe paid for, and let the alcohol roll around on his tongue, getting warm in his mouth. Being an angel was why all this was Cas's fault—or, that too, at least. Part of it was just because Cas was a tool. Since when were angels party-bombers, anyway? It wasn't like Dean had invited Castiel to come hang with them in Vegas. Or maybe he had, when the angel first popped into the car at like seven that morning—but damn it, he was running on four hours of sleep and bad gas station coffee, and he'd already had a hangover, and he hadn't meant it. And he wouldn't even have _joked_ about it if he'd been awake enough to remember that Sam had a huge girly crush on angels, as, like, a race, and Castiel in particular, and would obsess over Cas all night instead of hanging out with his brother like he was supposed to. Dean didn't come to Vegas to drink by himself while Sam made googly eyes at their resident angel and got soberer by the second.

Well, he didn't come to Vegas to chill with Sam, either. He came to get wasted and get laid, not necessarily in that order. But he wasn't getting laid right now, and that was why he brought his little brother along in the first place—to liven up the down times. Plus, Dean was ready to find "the one," a.k.a. the girl whose bed he'd be disheveling tonight. But where was his wingman? Ditching him to hang out with an even worse wingman. A couple of crap wingmen—that was all he needed right now.

"If you're that taken with her, you should go win her back."

Dean turned slowly to look to his left—slowly because his balance was a little blitzed right now, and what kind of a dick talked to a stranger in a bar anyway? A dick with a handlebar mustache, apparently. Dean decided it looked dumb as hell and also that he should try growing one like that, just for kicks. The man crooked his finger toward the bartender, the universal signal for _a glass for my friend here_ —and Dean was really not in the habit of letting guys buy him drinks, but whatever; the bottle of scotch in front of Handlebar looked top-shelf.

Dean tipped his head and took a swig from his glass as soon as it was filled. Then he got back to the business of figuring out why the hell this guy was talking to him.

"Win who back?" Dean asked, taking another gulp. The scotch was as good as it'd looked.

Handlebar threw a hand out at the club. "Whichever pretty girl you've been staring at with such passionate intensity."

Dean thought he would have been more disturbed by those last two words if he were a little less drunk, or if he didn't feel like he'd fallen into the grotesque fusion of a Humphrey Bogart movie and something with John Wayne. Dean hoped it was _The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance_. But then, he couldn't remember if that movie had a dick with a handlebar. That wasn't much of a surprise, though, since he could barely remember what Handlebar had said to him a few seconds ago. Something about a girl. Dean took another drink and shook his head.

"Nah, it's just my brother. We came to Vegas to live it up, but he ditched me to hang out with this friend of ours. Can't get him to have a good time with me."

"Ah." Handlebar nodded like he got that, which was stupid, because nobody got anything about the Winchesters without a three-week crash course and the world ending at least once. But he was sharing his booze, so Dean let it go. He did choke a little on his next swallow, though. "This friend of yours is a girl?"

Dean made a face against the burn in his throat. "No, man. It's that guy right there. That's my brother—the freakishly tall one in blue plaid. The guy standing next to him."

Dean did his best to point them out—not that Sam needed much indicating, since he was the only yeti in the club. Things were getting even worse over there; Sam was in full-out flirt mode, resting one hand on Cas's shoulder with the other one wrapped around the beer that had somehow appeared in the angel's hand, and was leaning down from his ridiculous height to whisper in Castiel's ear—and yeah, from their lips it looked like Cas was saying _I can't hear you Sam_ and Sam was saying _Cas if someone you don't know hands you a beer you shouldn't drink it_ , but whatever—Dean knew what was really going on. He knew when he was a third wheel and he didn't like it.

Next to Dean, Handlebar cleared his throat. Dean turned back to find the guy had a seriously wigged-out look on his face.

"Why is that man wearing an overcoat inside?"

Dean shrugged, wishing that were the weirdest thing Cas had done all day. It was crazy how that barely even seemed weird to him anymore. "That's just how he is," Dean told Handlebar with a shake of his head. He tried to decide how to sum up Castiel in thirty words or less. "He's emotionally stunted and understands about as much as a four-year-old, and he wears that coat everywhere. But beggars can't be choosers, I guess."

He'd sort of meant himself, and Sam by proxy, because it wasn't like they had enough friends to have standards. But Handlebar was thinking something else, probably, from how slowly he put his glass down. Then he smoothed a hand down his moustache—Dean had never seen a real person do that before.

"It's not my place to say anything," Handlebar started, the way jackasses always did when they were going to say something anyway, "but I don't know that I would approve of my brother seeing someone like that."

Dean almost laughed. "Yeah, well… his last serious relationship was with a werewolf or a demon bitch or something, so… it's not like Sammy's got great taste." That just made Handlebar look at him funny, though; Dean always forgot that the dicks he met in bars wouldn't understand half of what was wrong with his life. Dean took a last swallow of scotch. "Anyway, they're not even like that." Something uncomfortable nagged at the back of his mind, some intuition he wasn't sober enough to face up to, but Dean shoved it away, pounding the point in again. "They're just best friends forever now, and between doing each other's hair and making friendship bracelets, I can't get Sam to pay attention to me for five minutes." That sounded weird coming out of Dean's mouth, but he decided to go with it—he was too drunk to figure out which of those words was wrong. "I'll get him back, though. We've been together a hell of a long time."

Handlebar stared at Dean for a long minute, or two maybe—which was rude. There were a lot of rude dicks at bars, Dean had decided. Then the man stood up from his stool and pushed the half-full bottle of scotch over to Dean, and patted him once on the arm.

"Friend, I don't know that I understand everything you've said," Handlebar told him. Dean thought maybe he was wincing for some reason. The man tapped the bottle softly. "But I can see that you need this more than I do." Then he walked away into the crowd, and suddenly Dean was alone at the bar with a prepaid bottle of scotch and two glasses. The dick hadn't even bothered to finish his.

Dean did it for him, swallowing back a frown. Fuck that guy, anyway—Dean was not codependent. Or if he was, Sam was, too.

Dean sat at the bar for another minute or so nursing the scotch and ignoring the bartender's sideways looks. Then he stood up, too, and slammed his glass down on the bar—because most of what Handlebar said had been crap, since he didn't understand the Winchesters and never would, but he was right about one thing: after twenty-four years of practice, Dean could sure as hell win his brother's attention back from one nerdy angel. Sam was mostly hardened to his tactics by now, but there was one huge hole in his little brother's armor lately, and Dean had always been a crack shot.

"Fellas," Dean greeted as he pulled up next to them, taking a swig straight from the bottle of scotch he'd scored. Sam took one look at it and promptly put his bitching face back on.

"Dean, where did you get that?" Sam demanded.

"If you'd been at the bar with me, you'd know," Dean told him, capping the bottle. Sam rolled his eyes, but Dean ignored him, because Sam wasn't the first step of this plan—he had to start with the weakest link. He slipped the bottle of scotch into the big pocket in his jacket, and then slung an arm around Castiel's shoulders; no easy feat, because Cas was stiff as a board and Dean's aim was getting fuzzy, but he wasn't one to choke when something this big was on the line.

"Hey, Cas," he started, earning the basic _I'm confused but I'm listening_ expression from the angel under his arm. "I just had a fantastic idea. You ever had a lap dance?"

Castiel's eyes narrowed in puzzlement. Sam's got a whole lot wider, like the little hamster in his brain was having a heart attack. "Dean, you're not serious," his little brother tried—and Dean must have been rocking out the nonverbal communication tonight, because he could see the whole litany running through Sam's panicky brain— _We might be going to hell already but we are not going to lead an angel of the Lord into temptation at a grungy strip club in Las Vegas_ —but he didn't care, because Sam was watching him again, and their gooses were flambéed a long time ago.

Dean grinned. "What, Sam? You've been cockblocking Cas all night." Sam looked twice as horrified when he finished, "Time for this angel to get some action." Then he dragged Castiel into the crowd, and listened with half an ear to Sam bitching at his back as he tried to keep up. Dean didn't think he was actually going to get Cas into a strip club, but he didn't really care anymore—because he was drunk and in Vegas with Sam, and that was how it was supposed to be.

.x.

Sam was no stranger to the somewhat kinky edge of the flesh trade, especially in Vegas. But even in Sin City it seemed like there should be lines. Standing on the boardwalk with Dean and Cas and two hundred other people, staring up at a fake pirate ship swaying with amateur strippers, he realized they'd hit a new low.

On the deck of the enormous silver ship hugging the side of the Treasure Island hotel, a woman in a red corset and something one step up from a thong swung around one of the sail lines, revealing every side of herself in turn to the audience on the boardwalk. "My name is Cinnamon," her voice boomed over the loudspeaker. "But most people just call me Sin."

Dean, hanging over the rope rail that kept drunk civilians out of the water of Sirens' Cove, leaned over to elbow Sam in the stomach. Sam just stared up at the lights of the hotel and wished Castiel wasn't standing on his other side, watching the show with blank fixation.

Sam had been willing to do just about anything to keep Dean from getting Castiel a lap dance—which sounded wrong no matter how he tried to phrase it in his head—so he'd been thrilled when their progress down the Strip was stopped by the crowds gathered to watch the Sirens of TI, Treasure Island's outdoor pirate show. Dean had been thrilled, too, as soon as he'd realized that the highlight of the show (" _This_ is a show, Sammy," Dean had told him, looking back at his brother as he pushed his way to the front of the audience, "not a bunch of friggin' flowers.") was a whole pirate ship full of practically naked girls, dancing and gyrating on the ivory deck. Sam had decided the whole thing was less like a pirate show and more like a twenty-minute outdoor striptease that was free to the public.

Maybe the sad thing was that they weren't even very good dancers—the sirens who were basically strippers. Or maybe the sad thing was that Sam had been in enough strip clubs over the course of his life to know that.

Sam didn't think Dean had even noticed—his brother was about two centimeters from wasted, and Sam had never seen him turn his nose up at undressed women for artistic reasons. But Sam did kind of wish that he and Castiel could have skipped this. It was awkward to be seeing a strip show in the company of an angel, especially because Cas was just sort of watching the whole thing with his eyebrows drawn together, like he was recording every detail for future study. Sam knew any questions Castiel had would end up at his doorstep eventually; he'd worked hard over the last eight months to make sure that Cas came to him for answers instead of subjecting himself to whatever chunks of bad information Dean felt like vomiting up, but sometimes it was more curse than blessing.

It wasn't until the finale, when the sirens had bewitched a bare-chested pirate crew into boarding their boat and the whole ensemble was dancing to one last song while Sam reveled in the fact that it was almost over, that Castiel broke their mutual silence, leaning up to speak in his ear with an expression of deep puzzlement.

"Sam," the angel said, glancing over his shoulder at the raucous audience, "are they celebrating because evil has won?"

Sam glanced up at the boat full of twirling sirens, and then over at Dean, slung halfway over the rope fence with a bottle of scotch pressed to his lips—and finally back to Castiel, with his rumpled trench coat and serious blue eyes, probably the first angel of the Lord who'd ever been subjected to the Sirens of TI. He rubbed a hand over his forehead.

"Well, actually…" Sam began, trying to figure out where to even start his explanation. He gave the whole thing up as Dean sloshed his empty bottle over the railing, whooping so loudly it echoed off the water. "Yeah, Cas," he decided, admitting defeat. "Yeah, I guess they are."

.x.

Castiel leaned into the stone railing that bordered the walk outside the Bellagio and looked out at the dancing fountains, watching the play of water and light. Across the artificial lake that separated the hotel from the Strip, seeming to rise out of the glowing arcs of water, a half-scale replica of the Eiffel Tower glittered with golden light all the way up to the tip of its spire. Next to him, Sam bent to rest his elbows on the railing and breathed out softly, following the fountains with his eyes. The mist billowing from the rising water glistened on his face.

Castiel liked the fountain show at the Bellagio, he had decided. Something about it reminded him of Heaven. It was nothing simple like the image or the sound—Castiel thought it might be the intentions that seemed familiar to him, beauty attempted for its own sake. It was an agreeable contrast to most of what he'd experienced in Las Vegas.

They had seen the fountains briefly after the flower show, on their return path to the crowded sidewalk of the Strip, and Castiel had been intrigued by that glimpse of the shining arcs of water—but Dean had been eager to move on to the next bar, so they hadn't lingered. Now that the older Winchester was not with them, he and Sam had returned to the sidewalk along the edge of the water. Castiel was pleased to find that Sam seemed drawn to it, too.

The angel glanced at the taller man beside him, taking in the serene lines of Sam's face. Sam had seemed agitated following the boat show, and all the more so when their path through the Treasure Island casino led to Dean bumping into the young woman with red hair they had met in the elevator that afternoon; she was now dressed much like the dancers on the ship, which might have explained Dean's increased interest in this second meeting. Castiel had been momentarily distracted by the clanging slot machines, and he had missed the first part of their interaction—but he had resumed paying attention when Dean clapped a hand onto his shoulder and pushed him and Sam a few feet away from the redheaded woman, a fierce grin on his lips.

_Well, this is my stop. Sam, it's been real. Cas… you're a creepy bastard and I don't want to be bailing you out of the clink tomorrow, so stick with Sam, okay? You two crazy kids have fun. Go see another one of your shows,_ Dean had encouraged, and punched Sam's shoulder before he released them and turned away.

Sam had seemed relieved, but some wariness remained in his face as he watched Dean and the woman disappear between the gambling tables. It was the same wariness Castiel had often remarked in the brothers when they parted ways, and it was the reason he had asked, as they watched the pair disappear into the elevator, whether it was all right for Dean to leave. Sam seemed to have misunderstood his question, though, because he had just rolled his eyes, pressing his lips together before he replied, _He's in love—or as close as it gets with Dean most of the time. He'll be fine._ Then Sam's shoulders had relaxed, and he had reached out to touch Castiel's sleeve, just a passing brush of his fingers. _Come on, Cas. There's somewhere I want to go._

Castiel turned halfway to study Sam's features; the jets of water were racing up and down in front of the Eiffel Tower, and the lights that accompanied them glowed against Sam's face, drawing out the patches of shadow under his eyes and in the hollows of his cheeks. Sam seemed calm now, his forehead clear and his jaw relaxed, whatever tension Dean's departure had ignited in him cooled by this interlude spent watching the fountains. He watched a tiny smile steal across Sam's lips.

"You're staring, Cas."

Castiel pulled himself back from his scrutiny. Sam didn't look at him, his eyes flickering instead down to the rough stone of the railing, but the corners of his mouth quirked, rounding out his smile. Castiel turned his head slowly away and looked back at the fountains. The streams of water had congregated in the center of the lake now; in two concentric circles they bowed in and out, their reflections casting streaks of light across the surface of the water. For a moment, it reminded Castiel of sunlight.

Sam shifted at his side. "This is my favorite part of Vegas," he said softly, surrendering his weight to the railing. Castiel glanced at him once more to find that the reflections were in his eyes as well, drawing out the green in his darkened irises. The angel let his gaze flicker away.

"It is pleasant," Castiel told him. For a long moment, he considered the lights beyond the fountains, the hotels and the headlights and the streetlamps and the murmur of voices on the Strip; then he shook his head once, returning to the water. "More so than much of this city."

Sam laughed under his breath. "Yeah. I definitely don't love Vegas as a whole, but…" He hesitated, then gestured ahead of them with a loose roll of his wrist, smiling down at their hands on the railing. "There are places like this, and…even with everything else…just, it's nice, I guess."

Castiel waited for Sam to say something further. But his companion was quiet, and the angel held that peace, leaning into the stone and sensing more than feeling Sam's shoulder hovering next to his. Sometimes Castiel wondered if the things that meant the most to Sam were the things he didn't say—the places he left space because he didn't have the words, or the words were too fragile to speak. Castiel thought he understood all the same. He looked out over the water and listened to the echoes of Sam's voice dying away in his mind—then he breathed in, and straightened against the stone, drawing Sam's eyes up to his face.

"Why do you come to Las Vegas, Sam?" he asked. Sam blinked up at him from his position against the railing, his eyebrows quirked at the sudden question. Castiel held his gaze. "This city is wrong for you."

There was a flutter of surprise on Sam's face. Then he laughed lightly and ran an absent hand through his hair, shaking his head as though the angel had said something strange. "You make it sound so serious." Castiel just waited in silence. After a moment, Sam shook his head again. "I don't know, Cas. It's just something we do every year, so…"

There was a pause as Sam's explanation faltered halfway, and he looked away from Castiel, out at the fountains bursting up into a finale. Then Sam gave a small shrug, his shoulders shifting under the heavy fabric of his jacket, and something about that motion made him look very young to Castiel—younger than the angel had ever known him.

"Dean loves it here," Sam told him at last. His voice was quiet, almost drowned out by the music that accompanied the fountains, and Castiel could see a funny little smile trying to come out on his face, just tugging at the corners of his lips. Sam fidgeted with one brown sleeve. "It really helps him unwind and just…I don't know, feel like a normal guy for a while. And I don't really mind. I don't want to take that away from him."

Castiel studied his profile, almost a silhouette against the glowing arc of the fountains, the strength of his nose and the sharpness of his cheekbones striking in their dark contrast. Then he looked out at the vast shape of the Eiffel Tower and decided that was probably enough. Unlike Dean, Sam did not believe that love could be found here, and unlike Dean, Sam did not love this place—but Castiel understood suddenly that Sam did come to Las Vegas for love, because he loved Dean, whatever else.

"You are selfless, Sam," he said in a murmur.

Sam laughed under his breath and bent his head toward the water. "I don't really think so."

In the silence of the late evening they stood together at the stone railing and watched the fountains wind down, watched the lights disappear and the water plunge back into blackness, and listened to the footsteps passing endlessly behind them, others moving away from the sidewalk now that there was nothing to see. Then Sam started up and dug into his jacket pocket, and pulled out his cell phone, the glowing screen shining a new kind of light across his face. Sam's gaze flickered over the message.

"It's Dean," Sam said, looking up from his phone to meet Castiel's eyes as the screen went dark. "He wants us to meet him at this bar called Coyote Ugly." Sam made a face, and then his eyebrows drew together, a tic of confusion bothering his forehead. "He says he needs your tie?"

Castiel glanced down at the navy tie around his neck, then back up at the young man, his eyes narrowed. "Why?" he asked.

Sam slipped his phone back into his pocket and shrugged. "He didn't say. But honestly, Cas? You probably shouldn't let him have it. You'll never see it again." Sam sighed into the cooling desert air, and then stood up from his slouch against the railing, sliding his hands down the sides of his jeans. "I think it's just like fifteen minutes from here. So we can walk, or…"

"We have walked enough," Castiel told him.

Sam seemed to understand, because he didn't flinch as the angel raised two fingers to rest against his forehead. But Castiel paused there, and for a moment he did nothing beyond staring back into Sam's waiting eyes, the young man's skin warm under his fingertips. Then Castiel tipped his head to one side, his expression softening.

"Thank you, Sam," he said, quietly so that only Sam could hear him. "For showing me the fountains."

Castiel liked the way Sam's smile crinkled around his eyes.

"Thanks for coming with me."

.x.

Sam wasn't really surprised to find Dean in a bar where the back wall featured a wire hung with women's bras. In retrospect, he was more surprised that it had taken Dean so long to end up here. His brother had a knack for finding the kind of places that made Sam feel like he needed to get an STD panel just from leaning against the wall.

Of the bars they'd visited over the course of the night, this one reminded Sam the most of the joints he and Dean usually hit when they were on the road. The walls were covered in bumper stickers and license plates, and the wood of the bar was plain, marked with deep grooves and classic bar stains. Of course, most of the bars they stopped in didn't have an all-female barkeeping staff who got up to dance on the bar a few times an hour with any women who felt like joining in, while a crowd of tourists swarmed around their boots—but the famous coyotes were probably something that only Vegas could pull off. Dean had snatched up all of Sam's quarters and his guardian angel and dragged Cas off to teach him how the jukebox worked, leaving Sam with a few minutes alone; there were no tables or even stools in this bar, so he was just lounging against the wall near the counter, out of the firing zone in case the bartenders decided to spray the crowd with water again. His shirt wasn't dry yet from the last time.

"Get you something?"

Sam turned to find that a brunette in a low-cut tank top had walked up behind the bar next to him, a professional smile on her face. Sam smiled politely back.

"I'm good, thanks."

"No, he's not." Suddenly there was a familiar arm around his shoulder, and Sam glanced over to find that Dean had appeared at his side, sporting a grin that was two parts good mood and three parts alcohol. Dean nodded at the bartender and quirked his eyebrows. "Two Coronas right here. Gotta do my patriotic duty and get my brother smashed before I head off for the night."

The bartender winked at them and turned away to the cooler. She pushed her long hair off of one shoulder before she bent down to grab their beers, and Dean craned his head around to watch her stretch, leaning into Sam for balance. Sam rolled his eyes.

"Dean, I already told you…" Then he paused, glancing around for the other figure he'd expected to be following in his brother's wake. "Hey, where's Cas?"

"Ah, he ditched me," Dean said simply, straightening from his lecherous slant. "I tried to pull his tie off and hang it on the Bra Tree of Fame. He got all pissy about it."

Sam glanced back at the line hung with bras, and realized after a moment that there were a few men's ties strung up, too—somehow they were so much less visible than the lines of red and white lace. He gave the bar a quick once-over, and finally spotted the absent angel reading some of the bumper stickers plastered to the wall by the entrance, his eyes narrowed in that expression of serious study that looked almost as out of place here as his beige trench coat. He looked okay, though, so Sam decided to deal with one problem at a time. He turned back to Dean with a shake of his head.

"You know, to be fair, Dean, that is the only tie Cas owns in the world. Plus I think it's like another limb for him—he never takes it off."

"You got it off him in the hot tub," Dean pointed out in a tone that could only be categorized as whiny, and Sam fought the urge to talk down to his brother like a kindergartener and point out that _maybe if he had just asked_ before he just started putting his hands on the angel without permission, the whole venture might have gone better for him.

Their conversation was interrupted by the return of the bartender. She set their Coronas side by side on the bar, and then flicked off the bottle caps with practiced ease, each flip of her wrist a little flourish. Dean slapped down a twenty. Sam wasn't sure how much change that was, but it must have been a nice tip, because the bartender picked up one of the bottle caps and pressed it to her lips, then leaned across the counter to slip it into the pocket of Dean's dark blue jeans before she took the money. Dean gave Sam his classic _yeah she's hot enough_ look as the girl turned away to help another tourist. Sam scoffed under his breath.

"I thought you already had your one-night stand all picked out," he said, leaning back on one heel and looking out across the crowd. Some of the other bartenders were dancing at the far end of the counter, to whoops and raised beers from the guys in the audience. It was hard to pick out one redheaded woman in the middle of it all. "That girl from the elevator… where is your date, anyway?" Sam asked, even though the word _date_ was so wrong for how Dean conducted his business.

Dean took the first swig of his Corona and shrugged. "Trying to get up on that bar to dance with the coyotes. I already got Missy's bra off, though." Dean gave him a shark's grin, all teeth and predatory instinct. "It's the purple D-cup at the end of the wire."

Sam did not turn around to look for it. Instead, he just raised his eyebrows. "Missy? Seriously? A girl named _Missy_ wrote her room number on her cousin's ass?"

Dean shrugged again. "Maybe she made it up. She doesn't kiss like a Missy, I'll tell you that." Then he made a face at Sam, waggling his tongue inside his mouth.

Sam pinched the bridge of his nose. "You are such a tool."

"Hey, I'm the one who's got a girl for the night. So I don't want to hear it from the male stripper taking a dude in a trench coat home for sloppy seconds," Dean shot back, before pausing and seeming to the mull the words over in his own head. After a moment his face screwed up and he gave Sam a dirty look,

"Hey, you were the one who didn't think before you opened your mouth," Sam pointed out, tired of half-denials and jokes that circled around the only person he really wanted to be with. At some point, it really _wasn't funny—_ just sad.

Dean wrinkled his nose. Then his expression smoothed out again, and he took a long swallow of Corona, tightening his arm around Sam's shoulders. "Eh. You know what? I stand by it. Basically, I'm awesome and you're blessed to be related to me."

Sam couldn't help an incredulous laugh. "Oh, really? Why's that?"

"Why's that _today?_ " Dean corrected. Then he grinned at Sam, dropping his voice as he leaned in. "Because you know that cousin of Missy's?" he said, his eyebrows perking up conspiratorially.

Sam sent him a flat look. "The one who got Sharpied?"

Dean gave an incredibly unconcerned shrug. "I didn't check. But she's here, she's single, and she's a natural redhead, too—hot, friendly, totally desperate redhead. And guess what, Sammy? She likes tall guys."

Sam had to give his brother credit where he deserved it—no one could make him laugh the way Dean could, even if sometimes it was just because no one was a bigger idiot. "Dean…"

Dean shook his shoulder. "Come on, Sammy. At least come meet her. You'd like her—she's in college for psychology or sociology, or some crap like that. And she does yoga. _Yoga_ , Sam. That's gotta cancel out a few numbers in permanent marker."

Sam looked off down the bar. There were two girls up on the counter now, the greenish overhead light glinting in their red hair, and he thought he recognized one of them as the elevator girl they'd bumped into at Treasure Island—Missy, apparently. He wondered if the other one was the infamous cousin. He lifted his beer to his lips and smiled behind it, remembering times they'd come to Vegas when he was younger and he would have followed Dean over to meet some girl's cousin or best friend or little sister, just because it was better than watching Dean walk away all the time. But Sam was happy where he was tonight, and never going back to those days, because there was a half-rumpled, slightly put out angel of the Lord making his way in their direction through the crowded bar, and Sam couldn't think of anything he wanted more.

Sam turned back to his brother with a smile. "I'm good, Dean." Dean raised his beer in an _is that your final answer_ kind of gesture, and Sam shook his head, one side of his lips quirking up. "Really. I'm not interested. But… thanks."

Dean tipped his beer back, smacking his lips as he swallowed. "I'm just trying to look out for you, Sammy."

Sam rolled his eyes. "I know. But I'm fine, Dean." He glanced at the redheads on the bar once more, and then nudged Dean in that direction, watching the spark of interest that lit his brother's face as soon as he noticed the show. Sam ducked out from under his arm. "Just go have a good time, all right? As long as you're happy, I'm happy."

Dean tore his gaze away from the dancers to give him a wide grin. "Oh, I am definitely happy."

Sam laughed under his breath, feeling incredulous and fond all at once—that funny mix of emotions that Dean gave him so often. "I'm happy too, Dean."

Dean pinned him with suddenly sharp eyes. "Yeah?" he asked, like he meant it.

Sam dipped his chin. "Yeah."

Dean nodded once, hard. "Good. Well, cheers, Sammy." Sam reached out and clinked their beers together, unable to stop the way his smile was pulling out the dimples in his cheeks. Dean smiled back. Then the older Winchester rolled his eyes, and chugged half of what remained in his bottle, the Corona fizzing as he pulled it down. "All right. That's enough of that crap. You have a good night, okay?"

"You, too," Sam replied. "Don't let her Sharpie anything on your ass, okay?" Dean made a face at him and Sam made one right back. Then he watched his brother wade out into the sea of tourists, waving his beer over his head to get the attention of the girls on the bar, and disappear between the folds of other people, only his long wolf whistle lingering in his wake. Sam shook his head but couldn't shake his smile.

"Sam."

Sam's smile widened until he felt it in his cheeks. "Hey, Cas." He set his beer down on the corner of the bar and turned to seek out the angel who had appeared behind him—then he started, surprised to find that while the rest of Castiel's outfit was intact and perfectly ordered as usual, his tie had been pulled down in a sloppy loop, the two lengths below the knot askew across his white shirt. Sam blinked back into severe blue eyes. "Whoa. What happened to your tie?"

Castiel glanced down at himself, a small wrinkle settling between his eyebrows. "Dean attempted to take it by force."

Sam's mouth parted in a small 'o' as he imagined the ill-advised maneuver on his brother's part, the picture making him exhale with a short laugh. "Huh. Well, I'm glad he didn't get it. Um… here." Sam ran his hands through his hair nervously, weighing his options, then reached out and took hold of the tie, sliding the knot up carefully so it wouldn't come apart and have to be retied from scratch. Cas watched him vigilantly, his head tipped down, and Sam couldn't deny the pleasure he felt at the trust the angel put in him. Castiel rejected most touches, but not Sam's, and maybe that somehow made him special. The thought made Sam smile. He cleared his throat, letting his hands linger. "I should really teach you how to tie one of these."

Cas didn't say anything. When Sam glanced up to meet the angel's eyes, he found that his companion had refocused on the span of the bar behind him, staring out into the crowd through the pulse of the lights and music. Sam didn't know how, with that many people, but the clarity in the angel's eyes told him Castiel had homed in on Dean, wherever he was lost in the crowd. And there was a pinch of annoyance, because his brother was again somehow managing to be in the way without even being present, but mostly Sam was just amused. Sometimes he wondered if what Castiel had was something like x-ray vision; and then he smiled to himself, because standing in a bar in an overcoat and a disordered tie, it wasn't that hard to picture Cas in the role of Clark Kent. If instead of an alien Clark Kent had been an all-powerful warrior of God.

"Dean is coming back," Castiel said, his eyes catching Sam's for a brief moment before Sam turned back to his tie.

"Are you going to run off before he gets here?" Sam teased lightly, tugging the knot up to rest against the collar of Castiel's dress shirt. Castiel tipped his head back.

"No," he said, as though the idea had never crossed his mind. The angel glanced beyond him once more, and then his piercing gaze settled on Sam's face, resting there with an intensity that Sam could almost feel. "He is still with the girl from the elevator."

Sam lifted his eyebrows. "Yep. All night, probably."

Castiel let his head tip. "That is not in love," the angel said. He sounded sure this time, but still Sam felt those eyes searching his face. "That is the other kind, from the shirt."

Sam couldn't help laughing at that. "Well, yeah. But Dean's pretty much the poster boy for confusing the two, so…" Sam finally couldn't think of any more reasons to keep holding onto the angel's tie, so he finished straightening the dark blue knot and patting the lengths of fabric down against the shirt, smoothing out the last of the wrinkles. "Okay. There you go." He started to draw back, but before he could, a warm hand—the one he had been obsessing about off and on all night—settled on top of his, and pressed his palm flat to Castiel's chest, their fingers overlapping against the folds of white and tan cloth. Sam's head shot up, along with his heart rate as he stared into the angel's captivating blue eyes.

"Um… Cas?" he stuttered, not sure what he was trying to ask—maybe because he was not sure what the angel was trying to say.

Castiel stared back at him evenly. For a long moment he said nothing, just studied Sam's face piece by piece, his own expression familiar and soft but with some other meaning hovering just behind those piercing eyes. Sam stayed quiet and tried to quell the frantic thrumming of his heart, just waiting with bated breath.. Then Castiel seemed to decide what he wanted to say, because his jaw relaxed, his blue eyes sharpening somehow as he tilted his head to look up at the taller man.

"How does one know," Castiel asked, "when something is love?"

Of all the questions Sam had expected, that wasn't one of them. It all felt too real with the warmth of the angel's fingers resting against his, electric with tension, that steady heartbeat pulsing under his palm.

Sam blinked, trying to deflect the nervousness with a forced laugh. He jerked his head toward the stretch of the bar behind them. "How does Dean know? Honestly, sometimes I think he just picks the girl he has the best chance with…"

"No," Castiel interrupted gently, squeezing his hand a little as if that would help Sam understand, as if that little motion hadn't sent all Sam's carefully building thoughts into tailspins. "The right love. The kind that was here on the shirt." The angel pushed Sam's hand into the cotton of his white button-down, the silk of the navy tie sliding under Sam's fingertips. "How do you know it is love?"

Sam looked down at those piercing blue eyes, at the serious set of Castiel's features, and then down at his hand, pressed hard over the angel's heart, and knew that this was his chance. Cas was asking Sam about love—asking because he trusted him, and Sam could tell the angel anything he wanted. He could tell Cas that this was love, Sam's fingers over his heart, their gazes locked as though none of the rest of the world existed, and from the strange, intense look in the other man's eyes, he knew he would believe Sam. But it wasn't that easy—because there was the truth, and then there was the right thing to do.

"You just know, Cas," he found himself saying. His fingers had curled into the angel's shirt, as if subconsciously he knew that these words would mean he had to distance himself. Because Sam wanted Castiel to love him more than anything, but not like this. Not because Sam told him to; that was as meaningless as whatever lie his brother had told his date in order to convince her to give up her bra. With Cas—at least with Cas—it had to be real.

Sam could feel his chest squeezing tightly, and suddenly he needed his hand back. He slid it out of Castiel's grip as gently as he could, feeling the emptiness so immediately and starkly he had to shove both hands down into the pockets of his jacket. Castiel watched his hand disappear and then let his own slip back to his side.

"I will not know, Sam," the angel said, his fingers twining into a light fist under the edge of his sleeve. "I have nothing to compare it to."

Sam just shook his head helplessly. "It never helps to compare it to anything anyway." Castiel only looked more puzzled by this, his eyebrows drawn tightly together; Sam licked his lips and wound his fingers around the cell phone in his pocket, squeezing so hard the buttons left an imprint on his palm. "Cas," he started—but there was just nothing else to say, because he'd already said the only thing that was both honest and playing fair. "You'll just know, all right? Even you," he added, before the angel could open his mouth. "It's just something you know."

Sam had lost track of his brother. This was hammered home when a drunk Dean lurched into him all of a sudden, throwing one arm around Sam's shoulders and reaching out to shove Castiel back a step. The angel rocked back on his heels and stared at the older Winchester with thinly veiled annoyance; Dean was oblivious as usual, his shit-eating grin seriously undercutting the disappointed way he was shaking his head.

"Damn it, Sammy, we talked about this—you don't point your big googly eyes at another dude at close range. We covered that right after the cotton candy," Dean growled. He pulled his free arm back to sock Sam in the shoulder. "Honestly. I come back to get the girls a drink and I find you two stuck in the last thirty seconds of a telenovela? Thank God I got here before the fade to black."

"Screw you," Sam told him, grudgingly glad his brother was too drunk to hear the real venom in those all-too-familiar words. The fact that Castiel was standing across from him giving Dean the exact same look, and probably would have said it, too, if he'd understood what it meant, made Sam feel better—better than he had in a long time on one of these pilgrimages—and he couldn't help the stray thought that if Las Vegas was going to be like this from now on, maybe he wouldn't mind coming back next year.

.x.

Man had a fondness for light. It was not a difficult thing to understand. Humans had been small and weak at a time when there had been much to fear in the dark, and their first sanctuary had been fire, light the first thing that the teeth and claws in the darkness could not fathom. The race was no longer so weak, but like the end of a parable man continued to put up lights in the darkness, to remind himself of his mastery over the creatures in the shadows, or to comfort the deep, instinctual fear that could never be conquered, not fully, that told him to stay within the light, where there were no monsters. Fire and darkness were not so long ago, in the end.

Castiel wondered if that were what had drawn Sam to the window, or if it was something else.

In the darkened hotel room, Castiel stood at the foot of the bed that was his and Sam's, studying his companion's back. Sam had one hand pressed to the glass, staring down at the long corridor of light that was the Strip, the whirls of red and steady whites and pulsing blues that marked out every building and spire, every car and streetlamp and glowing cell phone. Castiel felt he had found Sam in this pose before, silhouetted against a window. He wondered what clarity it was the young man found looking through a pane of plate glass.

Castiel took a step forward, his eyes tracing the wrinkles in his companion's coat. "Did you find your lighter jacket, Sam?" he asked.

Sam leaned into the glass. In his reflection, just barely visible where it hovered in the window, Castiel could see the upward curve of his lips, his chin tilted down as though he were watching the street so far below them. "Sorry, Cas. I got a little distracted." He glanced back to meet the angel's eyes, and tipped his head toward the window, gently beckoning. "It's pretty from up here, though, isn't it?"

Castiel's gaze drifted to Sam's face, picking out his features through the glow of the city. There was something contemplative about him, none but the most surface of his thoughts rising to his expression, but he seemed calm, not at all unhappy, so Castiel let it go. He moved across the room until he stood at Sam's shoulder, and looked out the window as well, striving to see what Sam saw.

The lights, the city, the darkness. Hundreds of thousands of human souls mapping the space between illumination and shadow. It was nothing Castiel hadn't seen countless times before.

"It is not particularly spectacular," he said.

Sam's mouth twisted up at one corner. It took Castiel a moment to recognize that expression—it was the smile Sam wore sometimes when he'd said something rude without realizing or meaning to. He reconsidered his blunt words, but did not know how to replace them. Beside him, Sam nodded softly and slid forward to rest the length of his arm against the glass.

"Yeah, I always thought that, too," Sam told him, his voice light in the quiet room. "But for some reason, it seems better to me tonight. Not just the view—all of it." He exchanged stares with Castiel for a long moment, as if willing him to understand something unspoken, then let his gaze shift back to the city, a laugh slipping out with his exhale. "But I get it—I mean, the things you've probably seen… this can't be anything special."

That did not seem quite right to Castiel. He had some sense that it was special, this moment in the dark hotel room with Sam standing next to him, breathing in and out in a quiet rhythm—but he didn't think it had anything to do with the window. He wanted Sam to understand that but couldn't imagine condensing it into words. He turned back to the view without replying. For a minute Castiel simply looked out into the darkness, tracing each feature of the Las Vegas skyline with thoughtful eyes. Then he remembered Sam brushing his sleeve in the Treasure Island casino, as they watched Dean walk away into the rattle of slot machine bells, and his expression settled. He turned to Sam and placed one hand on his arm, taking hold of the fabric over his elbow.

"Sam. There is somewhere I would like to go."

Sam turned, blinking at the angel's sudden grip. "Sure, Cas. Where's that?"

Castiel hesitated. "You should hold onto me as well," he said.

Sam looked puzzled, but lifted a hand and grabbed his shoulder. Castiel made sure his grip was solid before unfurling his wings.

He set them down carefully more than a foot from the edge. All the same Sam took a sharp breath in and clenched his hand in the shoulder of Castiel's trench coat, staring with wide eyes out across all of Las Vegas, the lights of the city spreading out in every direction more than fifty stories below them. At their backs, the great steel struts of the rising spire were illuminated with thick golden light; Castiel studied the glow on the side of Sam's face as the young man took it all in, the flashing signs and buildings lining the Strip and the million pinpricks of light winking back at them out of the desert.

It took Sam a minute to catch his breath.

"Wow," he said, the word barely a whisper. For a while that seemed to be all he could say, his tongue darting out to wet his lips as he tried to process the change of scenery. Then he turned his head to catch Castiel's eyes, his hand tight on his shoulder. "Cas, are we… is this the top of the Eiffel Tower?"

"The replica of the Eiffel Tower," Castiel corrected him. He felt the corners of his lips tugging up into a small smile at the expression of open-mouthed wonder on Sam's face. In the long thread of his eternal existence, he had never had any desire to inspire wonder in a human, but somehow, with Sam, awe had become one of his favorite expressions. Sam glanced down at the steel mesh beneath their feet, and then up at the pinnacle of the tower, at the pulsing red light warding off airplanes. He leaned back to see the full spire and his hand tensed in Castiel's coat. Castiel tightened his grip on Sam in return.

"Wow," Sam said again, his smile breaking over his face like the enveloping golden light. "Cas, this is… incredible. This is…"

Castiel took a moment to appreciate the breathlessness in his companion's voice. Then he glanced at the earth far below them, pleased to find that their timing was good. He squeezed Sam's elbow to bring those astonished hazel eyes back to him.

"Look down," he said, tipping his head toward the edge.

Sam pressed his lips together, hesitating just a second as his gaze flickered across the empty air, the long descent of weightlessness between him and the street. Castiel smiled.

"I will not let you fall, Sam," he murmured.

Sam ducked his head halfway, his voice a little sheepish. "No, I… I know, Cas." He breathed in slowly, as if to steady himself; then his hand slipped up Castiel's shoulder to grip the trench coat at the back of his neck, his thumb pressed to the knots of the angel's spine, and Castiel shifted his hold to accommodate the new position, so that his arm wrapped around his companion's waist, so securely that even gravity could never tear Sam from his hold. Sam stepped forward until the tips of his shoes licked the open air.

Five hundred feet below them, out of the pool of blackness in front of the glittering purple and gold hotel, the fountains of the Bellagio erupted into the air, a circle of blinding white and a trail of turquoise mist exploding up from the water. Sam's breath caught and he tightened his grip on the collar of the trench coat. Castiel watched him intently.

"They are your favorite part of Las Vegas," he said, softly because they were close enough to whisper.

Sam laughed into his exhale. "Well, they were." Castiel's face pinched in confusion, but Sam turned to him with a smile, nodding his head at the spire behind them. "This would be pretty hard to beat, Cas."

Castiel let his mouth assume the hint of a smile. Sam twisted back to the panorama, and the angel did the same, letting his eyes flicker over the fountains and the Strip and the city of Las Vegas stretching out beneath them, seemingly without end. He felt the warmth of Sam's arm across his shoulder, and the breeze folding and unfolding the fabric of Sam's coat, safe in his embrace. And he decided he had been wrong.

"It is pretty from up here," he said.

Sam stared at him for a long time. Then he ducked his head and watched the rising fountains, biting his lip to keep his smile in check.

"Definitely."


	6. Epilogue: Midnight

**Looking for Love in Las Vegas**

**Epilogue: Midnight**

Two minutes after midnight, Castiel sat next to Sam at the top of the Eiffel Tower, their legs hanging over the edge and dangling in the thin desert air. Beneath them, the Bellagio fountains were dancing again.

Castiel glanced at Sam, his serene expression and the glittering reflection of the city in his eyes, and then down at his hand, laid flat against the steel ledge. Sam's hand was pressed over his, and his own was all but invisible underneath it; only his knuckles showed through the gaps in Sam's long fingers. Castiel decided it was a feeling he liked very much, the warmth of their hands pressed together.

In the distance, where the mountains would have broken the horizon, a plane was bisecting the sky, the only mark of its presence the white trail flaring in its wake and the red and blue lights blinking on its wings. Castiel watched it until Sam's voice called him back.

"This is the last show."

Castiel turned to him, and found that Sam was still looking down at the fountains, following every glowing arc with his eyes. The warped echoes of The Star Spangled Banner drifted up to them on the breeze. Sam shrugged under his lightweight jacket.

"They end it at midnight. So we'll be going back, I guess?"

Castiel pressed his hand down into the metal ledge and wondered how long the impression would stay on his fingertips.

"Only if you wish to," he said.

Sam tore himself away from the world below to meet the angel's eyes. Castiel held his gaze evenly. A smile crossed Sam's face and lingered at the corners of his mouth; he didn't say anything, but as he turned back to the city he leaned into Castiel's shoulder, the breeze stealing a tiny laugh from his lips.

Castiel doubted he would ever understand love. But he had found something in Las Vegas, and sitting there watching the midnight fountains, with Sam's hand over his, it felt like enough. Sam breathed in and Castiel looked out into the black, out over the skyline of a city in constant motion, and without thought he counted them all—every light in the darkness.


End file.
